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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.)
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.
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.
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?"
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Look, nobody likes taxes, licensing restrictions, having to clean your car, or requiring you don't just hang out at the airport where people will pay tons of money.
The reasons we have those is that unlicensed cabs were a big problem.
Unlicensed cabs were a big problem because cabs and customers were not regulated.
The government stepped in and cleaned up the cabs, enforcing a standard of quality control of the cabbies but not the customers. It's the "regulation" model, and it was appropriate for its time, but it only addressed half the issue: a customer could jump out and run away without paying, could slit the seat, could vomit in the seat, or do other unsavory things.
Over time the regulation became less enforced, watered down, corrupt, and fewer people cared. This has resulted in the situation we have now, where many cabs are filthy and disgusting, the cabbie will screw you out of money in various ways (jimming the meter, taking the long route, &c), and it's not particularly safe.
In game theory terms, it's two kids dividing a cake: mom tells one kid to divide the cake equally, then leaves.
With the rise of ubiquitous communication we can now go to a newer model: both cabbies and customers can be vetted by the system. The cabbies are reviewed by the feedback of customers, and the customers are reviewed by the cabbies. Anyone who slits a seat or vomits will get a bad review and won't have access to the drivers in the future. Anyone who drives a filthy car will get a bad review and not have access to passengers in the future.
The game-theory model is different. Instead of one side promising to obey regulation, it's two sides regulating each other. It's the "one child divides the cake, the other child chooses which piece to eat" model.
This is an example of bad regulation which stifles innovation. Cab regulation ensured quality and was done with the best of intentions, but it's been subverted and there's now a better way.
We should embrace the better way.
I actually work under a union (SEIU 503):
My union doesn't impose their views on me - I'm not sure how that would actually work. They do send out a newsletter - I can either read it or not. Contrary to what you may think they don't shout their beliefs over loudspeaker.
You can't do anything (really) to prevent someone from crossing the line, but you can make it more difficult. While your co-workers are out working hard to keep management from decreasing your pay you sit on your ass reaping the benefits.
On your last point - I hate people who reap all the benefits that we worked hard for in our union, but don't participate at all. If you don't like working in a union shop - leave the company - that's your right to work :).
Unions worked hard for the weekend - remember that any time you have a day off.
The operative parts of Taft-Hartley here would be:
1) The sanction of "Right to Work" laws and jurisdictions, which abridge the right to contract. If you own a company in a right-to-work state, the you're surrounded by a magic bubble that makes it impossible for you to ever sign a contract of adhesion with labor. Any other company can compel whatever terms they please -- cable companies have contract rights than employees.
2) The prohibition on secondary actions, sympathy strikes and boycotts.
3) The general complications arising from forming a union, the card check requirements, the arbitrarily high bar imposed on NLRB recognition of a collective bargaining unit. The NLRB's utter toothlessness in policing employer corruption and tampering in union votes would be a contributing issue to this, including intimidation, misinformation campaigns, pretense firings of organizers and activists...
That's why the union has a contract with the employer, wherein the employer agrees to not hire anyone who isn't a member of the union. That's basically how it works.
Pickets and boycotts are mostly effective, because human beings have shame. It depends on the cause though; I work in the entertainment industry and in LA, everyone else does, so everyone understands what's at stake for the people on strike and people respect picket lines. Similarly, if hotel cleaning staff are protesting to make a living wage instead of $8 an hour, people will tend to be sympathetic. These kinds of strikes work. Striking public employees are a lot less successful; if the BART strike in SF had gone on for another week or two it probably would have rolled the union.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
As a motorcyclist -
Rain and cold are doable (for ever so slightly more money, for cold weather gear).
Snow is not, just not enough people with the equipment and skill to do it safely.
Large deliveries are doable, with mild modifications to the bike. My bike has a luggage mount that could be fitted with a cage that could hold 8-12 pies or so. You could fit 15lbs or so of stuff on the tail, and use a tank bag for transaction material. Most bikes could reasonably handle 150lbs of cargo, which is way more than you need for pizza delivery. If Domino's provided the bikes, it wouldn't be a big deal to fit them with a rack specially designed for pizza.
It would take a change in mind set on the part of Domino's. Realistically they'd have to provide the motorcycles. That is never going to happen for an entirely separate reason - you couldn't insure the operation. The extra insurance money would eat the fuel savings many times over. Also finding riders would be harder than finding drivers - although with reasonable benefits I'd seriously consider changing careers. Riding around all day beats sitting in a cube, hands down.
In CA, you'd probably get faster delivery too, due to lane sharing.
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?
Learn to love Alaska
Here, wiki has an okay overview. The system used to be more like you describe, between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, but since the lat 1940s there've been no closed shops. Neither an employer nor a union can force you to join a union, at best they can make you pay an agency fee, which are dues less whatever the union spends on political action.
Compare this with the rights of a shareholder, who nominally is free to invest or not, but has no say over how his investment is used for political speech. Really what's happened over the past 70 years is rich people and the managerial class have convinced the government to slowly cripple bottom-up capital organizations, things like unions, community orgs, NGOs and social/environmental activists, tarring them as "special interests," while they walk away with all the money and spend it freely and without any limitation on political campaigns, often without the sort of consent on the part of their constituencies that they routinely accuse unions of breaching.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Stop watching TV and restrict your comments to things that happen in the real world.
Uh, the 8 hour day can be traced, in American history, to labor agitation going back to the 1830s. The AFL made an 8 hour day part of its platform in 1886. The United Mine Workers won an 8 hour day through collective bargaining in 1898, and many organized skilled trades won an 8 hour day around this period. Citing Ford as the creator of the 8 hour day is like saying John Glenn invented powered flight. Ford, at best, was an 8-hour day concern troll who undertook the change to mollify trade unionists who were attempting to organize the auto industry at the time.
Well, the capitalist/propertarian status quo ante is based on the idea that "you can tell someone else what they can and can't do" if you're an employer, because you own. Trade unionism is a reaction to that, it's based on the idea that a union can tell someone else what they can and can't do because it has strength in numbers, and it fights for a just cause: for a fair and equitable stake for labor. Both positions are founded in moral sentiments.
The "right-to-work thing" traces its roots to the fact that wage-earning is considered socially low-status in the south, to the extent that politicians could kick factory workers in the teeth and nobody would raise a finger in protest. There was also the fear at the time that African-Americans would begin to join unions, as the racist attitude that had prevailed in organized labor through the first half of the century abated, and that they would serve as a cradle for racial "agitation" and activism.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
2. Freedom of assembly MUST mean that employees have a right to agree not to work with someone who isn't in the union - otherwise it isn't freedom of assembly;
Absolutely, and they have the right to quit their job if they don't like you, but forcing you to leave at their behest is definitely crossing the line. This is actually the basis upon which the first successful unions were formed in the 1800's - keeping Chinese laborers from taking their jobs, later extended to keeping blacks from taking their jobs.
The nice thing about a right to work state is that unions don't have the power to force you out of a job. If the union itself doesn't like it, it is free to leave. Unions can and do exist in right to work states, they even have strikes on occasion. In right to work states unions are focused on being a collective rather than being focused on having power over both their members and their employers. Some say unions are toothless in right to work states, and I would say that is also correct because they don't have the ability to bite their own members - nor should they anyways.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I don't understand why forcing you to leave is crossing the line, sorry - as long as the "force" is simply refusing to work with you. The language is off: to use a car analogy, because /. seems to find them funny, it's like saying I'm "forcing" you not to use my car just because I won't give you the keys. In fact, I have the privilege to simply not give you the keys - it's my car!
Any democracy will end up creating compromises which don't please the minority. The union is a trade-off, where the workers enjoy power in numbers, but some workers will sometimes lose out short term on some things. Overall, the labour movement has benefitted workers. As with any power structure, Churchill's maxim still applies: it is the worst, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.