What If the "Sharing Economy" Organized a Strike, and Nobody Came?

Nerval's Lobster writes "In Boston, a number of UberX drivers reportedly planned to strike yesterday afternoon in response to a rate cut. (UberX is a low-cost program from Uber, which is attempting to "disrupt" the traditional cab industry via a mobile app that connects ordinary drivers in need of cash with passengers who want to go somewhere.) Uber tried to preempt the strike with a blog posting explaining that the rate cut actually translated into more customers and thus more revenue to drivers, but it needn't have bothered: according to local media (the same media that reported a strike was in the making) a strike failed to materialize. Many of the biggest firms of the so-called 'sharing economy,' such as Uber and Airbnb, are locked in battle with some combination of deeply entrenched industries and government regulators. But if the 'labor' that drives the sharing economy becomes more agitated about its compensation, it could create yet another interesting wrinkle. The Boston strike may have fizzled, but that doesn't mean another one, in a different city, won't enjoy more success." Free (or freer) entry makes occupation-based roadblocks harder to enforce, though, so Uber and other crowd-sourcing matchmakers are tougher to pin down and disrupt in the way that more tightly controlled enterprises are. (Not that city councils and other bodies aren't trying to corral crowd-sourced undertakings into their regulatory purviews, putting a damper on some of that freewheeling disintermediation.)

Comments

Labor is valueless

[i kan reed]

As long as the money is concentrated in very few hands, the price of labor basically becomes fiat of the wealthy. You, as a first world citizen, can't compete on price and survive.

Re:Labor is valueless

[cascadingstylesheet]

In certain specific cases, a sudden outbreak of competition-on-price (say, an outsourcing, or the liberalization of trade policy in a previously tariff-protected industry) may really show a group of first world workers how much they can't compete on price with some 3rd-worlders of similar skill; but in the longer term, it's not as though being unable to compete on price is exclusive to the first world: Unless you have some very-hard-to-reproduce talent (in which case you aren't competing on price), the expected price set by pure price competition will be whatever bare subsistence costs(any lower, and the labor will starve, any higher and somebody who is unemployed will be willing to work for bare subsistence...)

Except that there is very rarely pure price competition, which is why we didn't see ever increasing dystopia since the industrial revolution.

Sorry, you can't blame the current economy on too much capitalism. (Or too much robotics, for another favorite dystopian scenario).

No, something else happened circa 2008 to turn a recession into an ongoing malaise. And it sure as heck wasn't too much capitalism or too little government.

Re:Labor is valueless

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't aware that the laws of biology and physics had been canceled. Can you forward the memo?

A living wage is just that, the minimum wage on which people can LIVE. If a living wage is not paid by one's employer, the person must either die or receive the missing portion from another source. Right now that other source is the state in the form of food stamps and other benefits. Employers know that. McDonald's and Wal-Mart have entire departments dedicated to helping their workers get whatever they refuse to pay them from the state.

McDonald's bitches that if they paid a living wage the price of a BigMac would go up by whatever and the consumer would therefore have to pay more. Guess what? The consumer ALREADY pays more in the form of taxes that are then used to pay for benefits that help poorly paid MCDonald's employees.
And in reality McDonald's doesn't have to raise prices. They can also lower their profits (i.e. allocate more of their earnings towards paying for labor). They can afford it. There is no doubt about that.

What "sharing economy"?

[timeOday]

Are they still trying to maintain the transparent fiction that this is anything but a taxi company that doesn't want to be called one, for regulatory purposes? They talk about driver earnings per hour, yet want to be treated like some college buddies carpooling home for thanksgiving break. It's a crock.

Re:A Peek At The Market

[iluvcapra]

Quite the opposite of what happens when a government monopoly on things has their labor go on strike, like mail (pre-internet, when it was really needed) or public transportation of today

It's a little scary to see a commenter automatically assume that the only people who ever go on strike are government workers -- proud private sector union employee here. The Taft-Hartley Act had the effect, in the US, of slowly killing the private sector union and leaving only government employees organized, so that union formation became a privilege or a bennie, as opposed to a protected right of anyone who works.

This is exactly how actions against private firms are supposed to operate. Uber drivers strike or boycott against Uber, a competitor snags available clients until Uber and the drivers reach an agreement. The fact that all Uber drivers are on the Internet makes them easier to organize, but it makes a picket harder to enforce: how do the strikers know for sure their buddy isn't taking Uber work while they're on "strike?"

Re:Easy

[AK Marc]

Unions were created when employers would rather kill 10 workers than spend $100 on a safety widget. And when strikes happened, the employers would call in private security with a license to kill. That the union bosses had to be more ruthless than mob bosses to deal with the amoral employers is the fault of the employers. They got the unions they deserved, and no worse.

It's always hilarious to me when the free market nutjobs defend corporations as freedom to assemble and such, but unions should be illegal. What, you shouldn't be free to assemble workers, only free to assemble capital?

Re:A Peek At The Market

[iluvcapra]

The 5 day, 40h work week was introduced by Ford in 1926 in order to increase productivity, under no pressure from unions.

Well, that's what he said, anyways, obviously he'd have a pretty good reason not to seem stampeded into it. Unions had been agitating for a five-day week for decades and he didn't invent the thing, it was common the textile industry since the aughts, mainly because a significant number of Jews were involved in needle trades and they wanted to have Saturdays off for the sabbath. (Ford was of course a terrific anti-Semite, so this probably wasn't his justification.)

The catch with all of Ford's labor innovations were that they were always understood to be a gift on his part. It had to be his idea, and his time to give. The suggestion that labor had earned it, or that it was their due, was out of the question, and he reserved the right to withdraw his liberal labor practices at a moment's notice if anything displeased him.

A lot like Disney later on, he took the organizing of his business as a personal betrayal, because he'd always seen himself not as an employer or an economic actor, but as a sort of father who, through his benevolence, had earned the right to tell people how to live their lives. This was the same guy that mandated his employees go to dances, took it upon himself to organize their social lives and wasn't afraid of firing people for looking funny or having heterodox opinions. Unions are completely antithetical to this idea -- you should be able to live however you damn please and win high wages and benefits not as some gift, but through hard bargaining.