If one thing is clear from Australia’s mainstream media over the last five days, never get between them and a pot of money — in this case, money stolen from the big tech companies under the guise of “content theft”.
If the media was misleading audiences beforehand about the news bargaining code scam, Facebook’s calling of Australia’s bluff and removing all the content that media companies insisted was being “stolen” last week unleashed a holy war against the social media giant, led by sanctimonious journalists, froth-mouthed academics, raging media executives and furious government ministers.
Unusually, this was one culture war that united left and right, with progressive economists and commentators competing with Coalition apologists at News Corp to see who could denounce Mark Zuckerberg more strongly.
Meantime in the Fair Work Commission, the pursuit by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) of Deliveroo for the unfair sacking of rider Diego Franco last year is winding its way to a close. The case will finish in the wake of a major ruling last week by the United Kingdom Supreme Court that Uber drivers are employees.
It was a bad week for the gig economy in Europe: Dutch courts last Tuesday also ruled that Deliveroo riders are employees. Both the UK and Dutch cases are long-running ones — the British drivers first took legal action in 2016.
A panicked Uber settled a South Australian case in December when judges mocked its claim that it was simply a marketplace connecting consumers with suppliers. The TWU began that case, involving driver Amita Gupta, in September 2019.
While big media companies can draft legislation for a compliant government to impose on tech companies in a blatant demonstration of sovereign risk, and then run a shameless and lie-filled propaganda campaign for it, trade unions here and elsewhere have to undertake the hard slog of litigation over years to try to establish some basic rights for gig economy workers — in particular, an end to the fiction that they’re rugged individualist independent contractors enjoying cherished “flexibility”, rather than employees.
Not merely has the media paid rather less attention to this long march for workers’ rights through the courts than its own battle with tech giants, but the government has displayed no interest in any regulatory intervention of the kind that News Corp and Nine have on tap. “It is clear that the evolution of the gig economy presents significant opportunities for flexibility and innovation for Australia,” opined Industrial Relations Minister Christian “Public Bar” Porter last year in response to a Victorian government inquiry.
Porter responded to Labor’s recent proposal to provide casuals and contractors with moveable leave entitlements with an absurd claim — credulously reported by many journalists — that it would inflict a $20 billion impost.
The gig economy — and a business model like Uber’s where there is constant downward pressure on workers’ incomes to curb the company’s massive losses — have been an important part of the story of wage stagnation in Australia and other countries over the last decade. In 2018, the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane argued that “the dark side of job flexibility is increased income uncertainty and job insecurity”. He noted that the share of the UK’s workforce that was “self-employed, doing agency work or on temporary or zero-hours contracts” had risen in recent years.
Job insecurity reduces workers’ pay power and weakens upward pressure on pay. Empirical evidence is consistent with that. Even after controlling for different occupations and locations, self-employment has been found to result in a wage discount for workers of around 15%. Temporary contract workers face a wage discount of around 5-6% and agency workers of around 2.5%. Zero-hours contract workers suffer a wage discount of around 7%.
In flowing through to what Haldane calls “income insecurity” as well as lower wages, the impact of the gig economy, as well as greater casualisation and short-term contracts, has very real implications not just for the lives of workers and their dependents but for lower economic growth and consumption. That is, it has far more direct impacts on people than the transfer of income from dinosaur media companies to tech platforms with more effective advertising models.
Workers, however, don’t have News Corp, Nine, and hundreds of febrile journalists to lobby for governments to do anything about it.
The Gig economy needs to go. Disruptors and sleazy businesses rely on the “independent contractor” to effectively increase their profits at the expense of employees who lack the capacity ($$) to fight back. Unions became irrelevant for many years as employees rights became minimum standards however, successive Limited News Party Governments have slowly stripped these down by creating loopholes and watering down the enforcement mechanisms.
Hopefully the decisions in the UK will have positive influence here but not holding my breath.
all this … and then add how the pressures of gig work provides yet another “crack” through which the pandemic can spread throughout our society
Wasn’t our esteemed Attorney General using the argument that contract workers earned at a higher rate than employees, in order to cover their own holiday, sickness and other benefits. Just last year, I thought. When they removed overtime benefits.
Although the main perceived benefit of being a casual worker is the loading, it appears less worthwhile than its typical face value of between 20% and 25%.
ACIRRT research in 2004 suggested that many casual workers were in reality getting an hourly loading of 10% or less. ACIRRT gave two reasons:
– while permanent workers were more likely to be on over-award rates, casuals were typically on the award rate. Today’s awards (unlike the arbitrated awards of the IRC’s time) are all set at wage rates below a reasonable level.
– casuals – particularly in the labour hire sector – were often classified at lower levels than they should be.
To which could be added:
– labour hire employees may be paid at a lower rate again.
– casuals may not receive an annual bonus and other one-offs paid to permanent staff.
– permanent (i.e. make-believe) casuals can be permitted to receive JobKeeper by their employer, whereas impermanent casuals will at best have JobSeeker.
In 2018, the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane found that British contract workers suffer a wage discount of around 7%.
The negatives you note are, mostly, legal.
The real threat of the gig economy is being wide open to illegal abuses, visa scams & the associated kick-backs, wage theft and the age old favourite, cash in hand & no tax revenue.
Thanks again to the all time class traitors, Hawke, Keating, Dawkins et al and Ole Wotever it Takes Richo.
Thanks a bunch, may your gold plated pensions choke you.
In fact this is part of an ongoing stratagem begun back in the 80s, or the 70s in the US, of outsourcing risk from employer to employee. It manifests in many ways, casual employment, the move from defined benefits superannuation to accumulation type schemes (you’re on your own if the share market tanks, sonny) to award stripping to penalty rate and overtime payments (Australians work millions of hours of unpaid overtime a year), to underpayment of wages with no government regulator worth the name, and finally to the ultimate destination, the gig economy with no hourly rates and bring your own car/bike.
They spite their own faces, and continue to bleat that they need both more flexibility, and more certainty. It’d be close enough to comical, except it’s tragic.
Szalami tactics slice by slice that can be predicted by following the Koch linked ‘bill mill’ ALEC in the US whose radical right libertarian socio-economic ideology can be channeled and drip fed through the IPA, then News Corp et al., ditto UK with EU Brexit.
Surprisingly even The Guardian, like all media gives little if any coverage to workplace issues (nor the full picture on oligopoly media vs. oligopoly BigTech), let alone an informed union perspective to highlight issues.
It’s as though promoting employment conditions and immigration have become no go areas for our Anglo/Irish heritage media and journalism, catering to and turning all middle aged and older voters, like themselves, into financially savvy libertarian capitalists……
Too many Australians are like ‘boiling frogs’, not just on climate warming (and disinformation) but on media, being informed and democracy, with the LNP government clearly ‘owned’ and not acting upon grounded policy development but ideology and ‘orders’ from above…. including God, libertarian ideology, Koch linked think tanks and Murdoch…..
Bloomberg businessweek on 17 Feb has article titled “Gig economy is coming for millions of American jobs”. A California law has allowed Uber and Lyte drivers to be contractors. Opens up processes for any business to use gig workers for almost any work situation. Let’s face it – unions won’t have the support of australian workers to change working wages, conditions etc. I suppose its because we think we are doing OK and it’s just those “others” who are doing it hard. “We” are also the “lifters” working 2 or more jobs to pay for living expenses. Plus we no longer hear of poverty in the media in any meaningful way – years ago, the churches had excellent media speakers – why no outcry from them? Govt funding stops them complaining?
I am thinking that many of our Covid 19 scares caused by travelers doing quarantine in our city hotels have been attributed to workers from the Gig economy who have had very little training,compared to other options.