By Robert Reich
How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?
Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.
Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.
They’re Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel’s on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap’s on-line doctors.
They’re Mechanical Turks.
The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the “share-the-scraps” economy.
New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.
Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.
The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.
Consider Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk.” Amazon calls it “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.”
In effect, on-demand work is a reversion to the piece work of the nineteenth century – when workers had no power and no legal rights, took all the risks, and worked all hours for almost nothing.
In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents.
Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.
This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.
It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers – work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.
And a way to circumvent labor laws that set minimal standards for wages, hours, and working conditions. And that enabled employees to join together to bargain for better pay and benefits.
The new on-demand work shifts risks entirely onto workers, and eliminates minimal standards completely.
In effect, on-demand work is a reversion to the piece work of the nineteenth century – when workers had no power and no legal rights, took all the risks, and worked all hours for almost nothing.
Uber drivers use their own cars, take out their own insurance, work as many hours as they want or can – and pay Uber a fat percent. Worker safety? Social Security? Uber says it’s not the employer so it’s not responsible.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turks work for pennies, literally. Minimum wage? Time-and-a half for overtime? Amazon says it just connects buyers and sellers so it’s not responsible.
Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the downtime in their calendars.
“People are monetizing their own downtime,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school, told the New York Times.
But this argument confuses “downtime” with the time people normally reserve for the rest of their lives.
There are still only twenty-four hours in a day. When “downtime” is turned into work time, and that work time is unpredictable and low-paid, what happens to personal relationships? Family? One’s own health?
Other proponents of on-demand work point to studies, such as one recently commissioned by Uber, showing Uber’s on-demand workers to be “happy.”
But how many of them would be happier with a good-paying job offering regular hours?
An opportunity to make some extra bucks can seem mighty attractive in an economy whose median wage has been stagnant for thirty years and almost all of whose economic gains have been going to the top.
That doesn’t make the opportunity a great deal. It only shows how bad a deal most working people have otherwise been getting.
Defenders also point out that as on-demand work continues to grow, on-demand workers are joining together in guild-like groups to buy insurance and other benefits.
But, notably, they aren’t using their bargaining power to get a larger share of the income they pull in, or steadier hours. That would be a union – something that Uber, Amazon, and other on-demand companies don’t want.
Some economists laud on-demand work as a means of utilizing people more efficiently.
But the biggest economic challenge we face isn’t using people more efficiently. It’s allocating work and the gains from work more decently.
On this measure, the share-the-scraps economy is hurtling us backwards.
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It’s kinda scary when high capitalism can offer “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence,” as if that’s extraordinary. And the beat drones on.
Technological unemployment is a given and there’s no way of stopping the onslaught. The upside is that:
“Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material. We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be “you or me,” so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.”
~~Buckminster Fuller in a 1981 interview
So why do we still cling so desperately to this outdated market system we inherited and why do we keep trying to tweak it to do something it WAS NEVER MEANT TO DO in the first place?!? The Purpose Of A System Is What Does–NOT what we want it to do, or what we wish it would do if only it were . . . some OTHER system, I suppose. Our system produces environmental destruction, high levels of inequality, deprivation, suffering, hunger and death. A Natural Law/Resource Based Economic Model is a FAR better way to use this technology (that is NOT going away, BTW) to more equitably and sustainably distribute the earth’s resources, raise the standard of living for even the top percents of the world’s populations, while preventing the 1 Billion people from starving to death.
Do you want to stay forever at “war” with “enemies” who “hate our freedom” and pound your collective chests in patriotic, jingoistinc fervor . . . whilst your ability to provide for your families needs continues to erode and dwindle down to below basic sustenance? A “Mad Max” sort of transition is a very real reality if we continue to wait for the either the politicians or the “Free Market” (sic) to provide for all of humanity’s basic needs, let alone improve our standard of living and keep from destroying the very lifeground that we ALL rely on for our continued existence. PLEASE, stop trying to treat the symptoms when the root cause of our collective illness continues to go unrecognized and unresolved. Reich is brilliant, but he and his ilk are like drunks at the bar arguing over the bar tab . . . on the Titanic.
We HAVE the technology–this is a TECHNICAL problem. We need to get to work fixing it as the clock continues to tick. Check out The Zeitgeist Movement (dot) com for more reality based solutions.
Best Regards,
Our technology is not serving us, we’re serving it. We check ourselves out at the grocery store (no human contact). We fly drones up to 4,000 feet in the path of airliners (wrong kind of human contact). We have cars that drive themselves, and I wonder if before they’re sold does the buyer sign an agreement not to sue the manufacturer when the guidance system fails? Or does the buyer purchase a giant- premium insurance policy against liability?
Our options are narrowing BECAUSE of technology. Jamie, I’m afraid you’ve launched another of those NRA-style arguments: technology doesn’t kill people, people kill people. It’s circular.
I agree our options are narrowing, but it’s because our technology has outpaced our psycho-social development. As they say, “it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools”. All the more reason we need to put our collective heads together and use the progress we’ve made in reasoning, philosophy, all the other sciences and yes, technology, to create a system of resource management and distribution that actually does what we want it to do (not the incredibly destructive things our current system produces–despite what we want/wish/hope it would do . . . if only these few dozen uncontrollable variables all happened to line up favorably).
Putting my anti-gun hat on the shelf for a bit–sure, it’s true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” . . . it’s just that the guns (technology) happen to allow (certain sick individual) people to kill a LOT more people than they might otherwise be able to using a knife or a rock or a sharpened stick. The point is that technology (and guns) are not going away and no one is going to forcibly take them away (without precipitating a civil war). So how do we as master craftspeople create a society or a system in which there is no longer any need to use guns/force/intimidation/technology to provide for our basic needs or to defend our tribe, or our little corner of the planet from the “evil doers” who threaten our “security”? Can we take a much broader view of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and “self-interest” to get to the root cause of these issues and address them at that level? I remain convinced that we can.
“Is it not in your self-interest to protect and nourish the habitat that supports you? Is it not in your self-interest to take care of society as a whole, providing for its members, so that the consequences of deprivation, such as “crime” are reduced as much as possible to ensure your safety? Is it not self-interest to consider the consequences of imperialist wars that can breed fierce jingoistic hatred on one side of the planet, only to have, say, a suitcase bomb explode behind you at a restaurant as a desperate “blow-back” act of retribution?”
~~”The Zeitgeist Movement Defined, Realizing a New Train Of Thought”
(the 323 page book with 883 footnoted references is available for free at the link in my post above)
We don’t worship at the same altar, Jamie, and it’ll be pretty tough to convince me to leave my humanist perch by arguing (at length) that we need to catch up to technology. Who’s going to show us how we do that, the technologists? There’s your completed circle, and I’m not buying what you’re saying.