After unionizing gig economy workers, Ontario’s courier union Foodsters United found themselves without an employer when Foodora filed for bankruptcy. Now they’re exploring how worker cooperatives could use the efficiency of platform structures to bypass corporate exploitation.
Gig economy companies and organized labor are at war over the future of work and the definition of “employee.” The companies’ strategy has split the labor movement by enticing some unions into a partnership-based company unionism instead of independent workers’ organizing.
The numbers don't show any growth in a gig economy. But that doesn't mean workers aren't poorly paid and insecure.
The perils of the “gig economy” have been overblown. Changes in work have the potential to open up new opportunities for labor.
Though companies like Deliveroo or Foodora refuse even to recognize them as employees, food delivery riders have taken a lead in organizing workers in the gig economy.
In Italy, striking food couriers showed "gig economy" capitalists they're serious about their rights as workers.
Deindustrialization and the "gig economy" can't explain the weakness of the American working class.
Barack Obama abandoned his commitments to unions, and many top staffers went to work for the gig economy. In his Netflix series Working, the former president bears witness to workers’ suffering as if it were immutable — and something he had nothing to do with.
The gig economy is notorious for using bogus self-employment to skirt around labor laws and evade collective bargaining. But in Italy, strikes by couriers have forced major food delivery firms to recognize their employee status — a success that also shows how we can revitalize the wider labor movement.
Work in the twenty-first century sucks. But it’s not because of a new “gig economy” — it’s because work under capitalism always sucks.
Stories about a new age of precarity are overblown. Workers have had to deal with economic insecurity since the dawn of capitalism.
A new report confirms that insecure and precarious work is widespread across the economy. To respond meaningfully to the needs of workers, the labor movement must grapple with the harmful impacts of precarity.
In response to the war on Gaza, the 100,000-strong International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers has called a boycott of Chevron-owned gas stations. It shows how precarious workers can use solidarity action to hit firms who profit from apartheid.
The recent Tory Party conference featured a perp walk of corporate ghouls — from public service privatizers to gig economy scammers and arms industry lobbyists — rubbing shoulders with government ministers.
Canada Post once set the standard for secure, middle-class work. Now, as government moves to gut it, postal workers are fighting against a future of gigified delivery jobs, vanishing benefits, and race-to-the-bottom wages.
DoorDash took a page from traditional restaurant managers: it stole workers’ tips. But even as it reversed course under public pressure, the delivery platform highlighted the exploitation at the core of capitalist employment.
Precarity isn’t the main problem with the US labor market. It’s that wages are low, benefits are eroding, and work is often dull and sometimes dangerous.
Uber and Lyft have made profits by exploiting their ambiguous legal status to avoid paying workers billions in wages, but taxi unions recently sued the corporations for millions. Their victory is part of a broader wave of worker attacks on the gig economy.
The burning task for the labor movement isn't to craft new pro-worker laws, but to build working-class power. Pro-worker legislation comes from workers flexing their muscles, not the other way around.
In Washington, DC, rideshare service Empower is arguing that it shouldn’t be subject to the same labor and safety regulations as competitors like Uber. In doing so, it’s updating the antidemocratic “disruption” strategy that Uber pioneered.