Brave new world of insecurity
Worklife is precarious for those who must report to an app, writes Diana Clement
Work is changing and one of the less than desirable aspects of the future is the uberisation of the workforce. This is the digital world where workers report to an app.
Those in the so-called gig trap are only as good as their last job and have “take it or leave it” work conditions even if 100 per cent of their income comes from one app (aka employer). They can be “deactivated” (fired) with zero opportunity for recourse.
The concept of the “gig economy” sounds appealing on the surface. Work when you want. But gig workers are at the most precarious end of the employment spectrum and traditional protections, even the existing watered down ones for contractors, are virtually non-existent.
It’s not just drivers relying on platforms such as Uber and Ola, or homeowners making their only income from Airbnb, as some do. Increasingly businesses can have tasks done through platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and others including Upwork, Fiverr, and Working Nomads.
Many of these non-standard workers work for less than minimum wage and don’t get sick pay, holidays, KiwiSaver, collective bargaining and other protections. Four-day-week champion Andrew Barnes, of Perpetual Guardian, points out that these hard-fought worker rights are fundamental to the kind society we want for New Zealand and are something we should be proud of, as they are not available in many other countries.
“My concerns about gig or more agile style contracts is their lack of benefits that we consider standard for the normal employee,” says Barnes.
Research conducted by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions found an estimated 41 per cent of selfemployed workers earned less than the minimum hourly wage in 2015.
New Zealand is already a low-wage economy compared to other Western countries, wrote Fulbright Scholar Laura Bernsten in her 2019 report: The Changing Nature of Work: Strengths and Shortcomings of New Zealand’s Benefits and Protections for Workers in Non-Standard Employment.
She argued that growth in nonstandard work would have a downstream effect on earnings. More than
half of temporary agency and fixedterm workers had consistently reported they would prefer permanent and ongoing work.
The plight of non-standard workers is an area of concern for government and the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, which has recently completed a public consultation on the issue.
Not all non-standard workers are in a precarious situation, says Bernsten. But the situation of more vulnerable non-standard workers concerns all unions in New Zealand, says First Union’s strategic project coordinator, Anita Rosentreter.
“We know there has been deliberate casualisation and contracting out for decades,” she says. Platform work through apps is the next phase and of particular concern to the union. With it comes more casualisation, which results in reduced responsibility and liability for employers.”
Rosentreter says platforms such as Uber have brought in behaviours that unions haven’t seen before. For example, many platform workers are unable to contact a person if they have employment concerns. “Sometimes the technology is deliberately impenetrable. You can’t even contact a person you are dealing with. Only a chatbot or algorithm.”
She has a particular concern about Amazon’s MTurk platform where work is broken down into tiny parcels that may only be pay a few cents or dollars for each. “It is piecework,” she says. “You can’t even classify those people as contractors. It is so far removed from any understanding of work we have at the moment.”
A worry, says Rosentreter is large multinationals such as Uber use their size to thumb their noses at local employment legislation. California recently passed legislation that made
Uber drivers employees. Uber said they were going to flout the law.
When Rosentreter talks to Uber drivers she hears that many work long day jobs such as bus driving or in factories, then a second job at night in order to make ends meet. The combined hours they are working are quite long, which, she says, creates a health and safety issue.
The plight of non-standard workers is only likely to get only worse. “It is probably fair to say we are going to be more and more people working for companies like Uber,” says Rosentreter.
Uberised work is tough. The general public often has no idea how insecure the work is and how few protections there are. On Uber, for example, drivers can be fired (aka deactivated) if their ratings drop below 4.5, but passengers will often penalise drivers for things totally outside of their control, such as surge pricing. A one or two star feedback is a vote for the Uber driver or Airbnb host to be fired.
Platform workers have no legal recourse to a deactivation, says Rosentreter. The conditions that drive people to this type of work have been created very deliberately, she says. “Wages have been driven down; people have become desperate.”
Unions have a great responsibility to be leading in this area, she adds. “Rather than saying it is too difficult, we need to be taking a stand and to be lobbying governments.” Union members and other non-standard workers can also raise the issues with their employers, although the bigger the employer and the further away, the more difficult this becomes.
Just how many non-standard workers there are now and could be in the future, no-one really knows. In a November 2019 report Measuring the “gig” economy: Challenges and Options, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research staff noted a dearth of information the nature and magnitude of gig work and the extent of its growth in NZ. Add to that a lack of economic and labour market data.
It means, noted Bernsten, that many policymakers and advisors are vulnerable to making ad hoc decisions to address perceived problems that do not exist, while failing to address significant problems that go undetected.