Uber and a Fake Democrat Caught Running the Prop 22 Playbook
Here's why the proposed deal for gig workers is a sham
Welcome to a premium Tuesday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
A few weeks back, I made a pledge to not devote too much of this newsletter to covering the countless awful things being done by Republicans across the country. I’ve worked hard to stick to that pledge, and right now, given the Democratic Party’s incompetence and myopia, it won’t be tough to keep the exasperation bipartisan.
I’m not going to lie: Today is a tough news day. It feels as if American democracy is the Titanic, Republicans are loudly cackling as they fill the North Atlantic with icebergs, and Democratic senators, assured that they have spots on the lifeboats, are just shrugging at the obvious impending catastrophe.
But hey, at least we’re not the Mets right now.
For all the significant progressive victories won by New York’s Democratic legislative supermajority this year, the project of making the state more economically equitable still has a long way to go. It isn’t just about passing legislation, either; right now, the progressive left’s main focus is on killing a very bad bill that would have once sailed through Albany on the way to the governor’s desk.
Late last week, word got out that a somewhat mysterious consortium of lawmakers, lobbyists, and misguided union officials was working on a proposal that would allow gig workers like Uber drivers and Seamless delivery people to “unionize” but would codify their status as second-class, non-employee contractors. As I mentioned in Thursday’s edition of this newsletter, expert academics and advocates expressed some trepidation and discomfort with the vague contours of the plan, which had been pitched as a kind of sectoral bargaining more common in Europe, and once the actual text of the bill leaked out, it triggered a groundswell of resistance that has put the whole proposal in serious jeopardy.
State Sen. Jessica Ramos, the chair of the Labor Committee and an ardent progressive, came out swinging against the bill late last week, making clear that she wouldn’t support any deal for workers that didn’t include significant input from workers, much less one as flawed as the one that was being cooked up in Albany. She stood in stark contrast to the bill’s lead sponsor, State Sen. Diane Savino, who was once a member of the turncoat Independent Democratic Caucus that caucused with Republicans and gave them the majority until 2018.
Los Deliveristas Unidos, a group of delivery workers who have been organizing throughout the pandemic, also rejected the deal from the jump. Other legislators and a slew of unions have since come out in opposition, joining Ramos and the activists, journalists, and academics in a united front. Even the head of the Transportation Workers Union, which would have likely been one of the two approved “company unions” that emerged from the legislation, has finally flipped on the deal (though not before viciously insulting original critics online).
The NY State AFL-CIO, the umbrella labor group that was in favor of the bill at first, also has abandoned ship.
Uber and Lyft spent over $1 million supporting mostly Democratic candidates in last fall’s legislative elections, supporting centrist incumbents who largely won their primaries. The contributions have proven to be down payment on a second life for a deal that would otherwise be dead and buried by this kind of majority party rejection. It doesn’t hurt that Uber’s head of worker communications is married to Melissa DeRosa, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s very infamous top aide, while other Cuomo aides are playing top roles in the lobbying effort on behalf of the gig companies.
Uber and Lyft’s goal is to repeat the playbook it ran in California on Prop 22 and confuse enough well-meaning liberals into thinking that the legislation would actually help workers, a cynical strategy that requires the other side to painstakingly point out each of the deal’s flaws and regressive points.
Veena Dubal, the Cal labor professor expert who was so outspoken against Prop 22, has been similarly outspoken against the New York proposal since receiving a copy leaked via Google Docs. I asked her to walk me through the proposed legislation and explain why and how it’s not just problematic, but regressive and even dangerous to the larger battle against gig worker misclassification and the effort to win them the rights guaranteed to full-time employees by the NLRB.
It Rigs the Negotiating Process
The appeal of the deal is supposed to be that Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and Instacart would kindly allow workers to organize into unions, but that’s really in name only. A labor board consisting of mostly gubernatorial appointees would have full discretion over which unions would be eligible to represent the workers.
“It allows the companies to declare labor peace right out of the gate without any showing of worker interest or support for a [particular] union, which is a process that sort of fast-tracks minority unionism,” Dubal says.
Workers really wouldn’t have much control over their fates, given the process that the proposal lays out.
“The companies would provide the union with an email-like message to contact all the workers, and then to become an exclusive bargaining representative, the union just needs to show 10% of statements of interest from workers,” Dubal explains. “There’s no election. Workers can't withdraw their cards. They can't change their mind for 12 months and support another union. It’s effectively set up to ensure that Uber gets to pick the only union here that would fall in place.”
It is overwhelmingly likely that the governor-controlled board would recognize two unions, the aforementioned TWU (for delivery workers) and the Independent Drivers Guild (IDG), which is actually financed by Uber itself. The unions would negotiate sectoral standards with the companies (which, again, fund one of the unions), and when they hammered something out, then the agreement they reach would be sent to the state to codify and enforce.
These unions would receive a 10 cent-per-transaction surcharge regardless of the outcome of the negotiation, which doesn’t exactly incentivize hard bargaining. Then again, the other stipulations of the deal wouldn’t allow for very much negotiating room, anyway, in part because the bill would ban striking and picketing, the biggest tool that workers have against unjust employers.
It Takes Rights Away From Drivers
This winter, a New York court ruled that gig workers must be considered full-time employees, making them eligible for benefits and unemployment insurance. The gig companies have been fighting this tooth and nail and this deal would let them out of it altogether.
“It takes the unemployment insurance rights away from gig workers and puts in place what I would call a sham unemployment insurance program, for which it is very, very hard to qualify,” Dubal says. “It also has fewer rights than the existing state unemployment insurance.”
It would also slash the hard-earned pay floor that gig drivers won a few years back and ensure that they don’t have to be paid for time spent searching for a passenger, which often takes up the bulk of a driver’s hour. Instead of $17.22-an-hour, the floor would be the state minimum wage for only around 58% of the time that drivers are en route to a passenger, which gets them to about $8.70 an hour, a pitiful number that cements precarity and unpredictability.
If workers wanted to challenge their earnings, well, they wouldn’t be able to prove that they were wronged by their employer, either.
“It gives up all the data and algorithmic rights, claiming them as proprietary to the companies so that the union cannot bargain over them,” Dubal explains. “It’s a recipe for disaster because all of the working conditions in this industry are disseminated via algorithm and if you can't bargain over how people are controlled in their workplace or how they're treated in their workplace, then you don't really have a lot of power.”
The kicker is that the state couldn’t issue legislation that overrode deals reached by the company unions and the gig monoliths, as this deal would carve out workers from protections in ways that hearken not just to Prop 22, but all the way back to the dawn of the NLRB.
“This is like a racial wage code — they are putting into place a new minimum earning standard that is far lower than the minimum wage for a subordinated racial minority workforce,” Dubal says. “Lyft has 70% people of color and immigrant drivers, according to their own data. This is very comparable to the agricultural and domestic worker carve-outs from the New Deal law, and the fact that it's being enshrined in this bizarre racial justice language of equality, that this is something good for workers, is just disappointing.”
President Joe Biden’s Department of Labor, by the way, can make this all moot by declaring that all gig workers who pass the ABC test should be considered employees.
For more data on the objections, check out Jessica Ramos’s post here.
Let’s run through a little bit of news!
Voting Rights
Mississippi: As I detailed in Sunday’s story, the Mississippi State Supreme Court threw out the entire ballot initiative process a few weeks ago in an absurd ruling meant to stop all avenues to progressive legislation. Now, whether and how the state legislature might revive the process is beginning to take shape, with some strange bedfellows and competing interests.
Arizona: The Maricopa County “audit” continues to be an absolute goddamn mess, with a new company now taking over the hand recount after the original company peaced as soon as its contract ended.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the state continue to blatantly rig the next election.
The State Senate moved forward on legislation that would send ballots with signatures that do not line up with the existing signature on file to the Attorney General for potential criminal investigation. Not only do signatures rarely ever exactly match, but it would also discriminate against older and disabled voters and discourage many people from even voting, given the risk of being arrested.
At the same time, the House Appropriations Committee moved to strip Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of one of her most important job functions: defending (or not pursuing) election lawsuits. The move would give the authority to the unhinged Republican state Attorney General until the end of Hobbs’ term, then revert back to the Secretary of State.
Hobbs responded with this subtweet:
Hobbs is up for re-election in 2022. If Republicans get their way, they may be able to cheat her out of a victory, either through voter suppression or flat-out overturning of election results.
The Cuck Caucus
I can’t tell if they’re bought by special interests, disconnected from any modern political reality, or just incredibly gullible and timid, but Democrats truly put on one pathetic display after another today on Capitol Hill.
Here are some lowlights:
Joe Manchin wants to continue negotiating with Republicans past Memorial Day in hopes of reaching an infrastructure deal with Republicans who will absolutely never agree to a deal on infrastructure. Even Biden knows this.
Democrats can’t even agree amongst themselves on what should be in the infrastructure deal or how they should pay for it. The issue? Raising taxes on the rich and the potential political impact the bill could have in 2022. That Democrats think taxing the rich to pay for lots of new infrastructure, child care, and millions of jobs is beyond insane.
Even more insane and sad? This statement from Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, begging Republicans to work with them on the 1/6 investigation, another thing they absolutely will never do.
Maybe Manchin and Sinema think they’re playing 3D chess or fooling the Democratic base into thinking that they’re actually trying to foster bipartisanship, but it’s not just infuriating at this point, it’s actually also really pathetic. They’re going to go down in history as the people who stood smugly by as American democracy was destroyed from within.
Workers’ Rights and Health Care
Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a noxious racist and friend to sex predators, just made Florida the 23rd GOP-led state to prematurely strip away the expanded unemployment benefits provided by the American Rescue Plan from beleaguered workers. At $275, Florida offers an unforgivably low weekly unemployment rate to the lucky few that can even navigate its disastrous, perma-broken benefits system.
Wisconsin: After Gov. Tony Evers called a special session of legislature in a (very deliberately performative) attempt to get Republicans to expand Medicaid, the GOP legislature gaveled it out in less than 30 seconds.
National: OK, let’s end on a (kinda, sorta) happy note. This afternoon, More Perfect Union released a new video report on Dollar General’s reprehensible treatment of workers and two employees who told them to shove it. I researched, wrote, and co-produced the piece, which has been getting a fair amount of traction online this evening.
The exploitation practiced by Dollar General is infuriating, but the bravery of the workers featured here and the attention it has brought to the retailer’s practices is very inspiring.
The Twitter thread lays out more details, so make sure to click through and get informed on the gross practices of America’s largest retailer.
That’s it for tonight — I promise to bring you a happier, more positive issue on Thursday!
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Maybe I'm misreading this, but why do you say "That Democrats think taxing the rich to pay for lots of new infrastructure, child care, and millions of jobs is beyond insane."
Hi Jordan. Your newsletter is terrific, but today you referred to Ron De Santa’s as “greasy”. While that may be true in one sense, it is an ethnic slur...so please use another appropriate adjective in the future. Thanks.