Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #prop22
Most recents (24)
#Enshittification is platforms devouring themselves: first they tempt users with goodies. Once users are locked in, goodies are withdrawn and dangled before businesses. Once business customers are stuck, all value is claimed for platform shareholders:
pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/pot…
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pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/pot…
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/alg…
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pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/alg…
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Enshittification isn't just another way of saying "fraud" or "price gouging" or "wage theft." Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a *digital* businesses.
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Uber just released its Q2-2022 numbers and trumpeted that it had finally achieved cash-flow positivity - and it only took 13 years and $32 billion in losses! So has Uber finally turned a corner? Will the company finally attain profitability and repay those billions?
Nope. 1/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-l… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-l… 2/
The best analyst of Uber's financial disclosures - as always - is Hubert Horan, a transport analyst who has made a second career out of debullshitifying Uber's balance-sheet deceptions. 3/
In the run-up to the 2020 election, "gig work" companies, led by Uber and Lyft, firehosed $225m to back the passage of #Prop22, a law that would permanently allow them to misclassify employees as contractors, not entitled to benefits or workplace protections. 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/sim… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/sim… 2/
More than a decade after *Citizens United* - the Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for unlimited dark money in US election spending - it's sometimes hard to get a sense of scale. Is $225m a lot of money to spend on a California ballot initiative? 3/
Gig work companies like Uber and Doordash are committed to misclassifying their workers as contractors, which lets them escape employer obligations like a minimum wage, health care or worker's comp (driving for Uber/Lyft is one of the most dangerous jobs in America). 1/
These companies spent $225m to pass California's #Prop22, a ballot initiative that formalized worker misclassification, paving the way for all kinds of companies to convert employees to contractors at the stroke of a pen:
pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man… 2/
pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man… 2/
Hilariously, all that money was wasted. Prop 22 was unconstitutional. It usurped the assembly's constitutional duty to establish universal worker's comp. It was (idiotically) drafted such that if any clause was struck the whole thing was invalid.
latimes.com/california/new… 3/
latimes.com/california/new… 3/
Gig work companies like Uber and Doordash are committed to misclassifying their workers as contractors, which lets them escape employer obligations like a minimum wage, health care or worker's comp (driving for Uber/Lyft is one of the most dangerous jobs in America). 1/
These companies spent $225m to pass California's #Prop22, a ballot initiative that formalized worker misclassification, paving the way for all kinds of companies to convert employees to contractors at the stroke of a pen:
pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man… 2/
pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man… 2/
Hilariously, all that money was wasted. Prop 22 was unconstitutional. It usurped the assembly's constitutional duty to establish universal worker's comp. It was (idiotically) drafted such that if any clause was struck the whole thing was invalid.
latimes.com/california/new… 3/
latimes.com/california/new… 3/
Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends.
Uber's time is up.
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Uber's time is up.
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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unt…
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pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unt…
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Uber was never going to be profitable. Never. It lured drivers and riders into cars by subsidizing rides with billions and billions of dollars from the Saudi royal family, keeping up the con-artist's ever-shifting patter about how all of this would some day stand on its own.
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When CA's #Prop22 passed in 2020, it killed the right of gig workers to unionize and it permanently enshrined the practice of worker misclassification: pretending employees are independent contractors, not entitled to health care, overtime, pensions or basic protections.
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Uber, Lyft and other "gig" companies spent $205m to pass the ballot initiative, almost as much as was spent on EVERY legislative race in the state - it was the most expensive ballot initiative in American history.
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That money was accompanied by some powerful endorsements, including the California NAACP, which struck many observers as deeply strange, given that the most exploited workers in the gig economy are Black.
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New Yorkers have a new ridehailing alternative to Uber: @TheDriversCoop is a driver-owned, app-based ride-hailing service that pays drivers more, charges riders less, and pays out any profits to driver-owners as periodic dividends.
nytimes.com/2021/05/28/tec…
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nytimes.com/2021/05/28/tec…
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#PlatformCooperativism is a powerful antidote to app-based gig work: a way to provide customers with the convenience that made app-based services so popular while putting workers in control of their days, schedules and working conditions.
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It's particularly buoying to see a platform co-op challenge Uber, a company that started as a way to funnel Saudi royals' billions into a bid to dismantle public transit and worker protections in a single fell swoop.
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"Saying the quiet part out loud," is a cliche, but like so many shopworn phrases, it has its roots in real truths that bear repetition.
Back in 2017, a bunch of Wall Street bros SHOUTED the quiet part out loud.
vox.com/new-money/2017…
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Back in 2017, a bunch of Wall Street bros SHOUTED the quiet part out loud.
vox.com/new-money/2017…
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The occasion was an American Airlines earnings call in which management revealed that the company had recorded solid profits and was going to use some of them to bring pilots and flight-attendants wages up to parity with Delta and United.
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Wall Street LOST ITS SHIT. The iconic example was @Citi analyst Kevin Crissey, who whined:
"This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again."
Wall Street agreed with Crissey. AA's share price plummeted.
latimes.com/business/la-fi…
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"This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again."
Wall Street agreed with Crissey. AA's share price plummeted.
latimes.com/business/la-fi…
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Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It's a "bezzle" ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it").
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The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.
pluralistic.net/2020/05/19/lar…
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pluralistic.net/2020/05/19/lar…
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When that didn't work, the company's investors suckered the public into taking their shares off their hands in an IPO premised on two things:
I. Self-driving cars
II. All buses and subways IN THE WORLD being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.
pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…
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I. Self-driving cars
II. All buses and subways IN THE WORLD being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.
pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…
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One of the Biden admin's most important pieces of legislation is the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (#PROAct), which reverses decades of union-busting policies and laws that have led to widening inequality, wage stagnation, and working poverty across America.
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It's the first pro-worker law since 1935's NLRA, and it restores many of the rights to organize unions and create serious penalties for employers who break the law to prevent their workers from unionizing (today, employers break labor laws with impunity).
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For a great, plain-language breakdown of its contours, check out this breakdown by @GrimKim, @TeenVogue's labor reporter. Note that the law bans many of the dirtiest tricks used by Amazon to defeat the union drive in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.
teenvogue.com/story/what-is-…
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teenvogue.com/story/what-is-…
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My latest @locusmag column is "Qualia," and it argues that every attempt to make an empirical, quantitative cost-benefit analysis involves making subjective qualitative judgments about what to do with all the nonquantifiable elements of the problem.
locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-d…
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locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-d…
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Think of contact tracing. When an epidemiologist does contact tracing, they establish personal trust with infected people and use that relationship to unpick the web of social and microbial ties that bind them to their community.
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But we don't know how to automate that person-to-person process, so we do what quants have done since time immemorial: we decide that the qualitative elements of the exercise can be safely incinerated, so we can do math on the quantitative residue that's left behind.
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"Gig economy" is a polite term for "worker misclassification" - a way to violate labor law by pretending that your employees are actually independent contractors.
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Unsurprisingly, the companies that cheat their employees also cheat their other suppliers. Doordash spent the entirety of the crisis preying on beloved, endangered local restaurants with a string of outright frauds:
pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-…
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pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-…
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By colluding with Google, Doordash was able to interopose itself between restaurants and diners, making it nearly impossible for us to transact together without giving Doordash a cut that exceeded the restaurant's margin, making every order a money-loser.
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Uber is a money-hemmorhaging bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). It's $6.8b losses in 2020 are not an aberration.
pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/rin…
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pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/rin…
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Uber will never be profitable.
Like all scams, Uber depends on fresh suckers coming in and buying out the last round of suckers. To do this, the company has to keep running, even as it loses money.
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Like all scams, Uber depends on fresh suckers coming in and buying out the last round of suckers. To do this, the company has to keep running, even as it loses money.
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In fact, the longer Uber stays in business while losing money, the more suckers flock to it. The thinking goes, "All these investors who piled into a money-losing company must know something I don't about how it will become profitable someday."
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In late 2020, a coalition of predatory, money-losing, private-equity backed companies ran a $200m disinformation campaign that resulted in the passage of California's #Prop22, legalizing worker misclassification and mass-scale labor law violations.
pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/fin…
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pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/fin…
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Almost immediately, the passage of #Prop22 led to the loss of unionized jobs paying a living wage and offering basic worker protections, especially for people of color - only to have them replaced by "gig work" that lacked any of the above.
pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man…
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pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man…
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One of the primary funders - and beneficiaries - of Prop 22 was Uber, which pioneered worker misclassification. Uber is now pushing the EU to "harmonize" its regulations in a game of transatlantic pingpong where each volley makes things worse.
cnbc.com/2021/02/15/ube…
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cnbc.com/2021/02/15/ube…
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#Prop22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in history: "gig economy" companies firehosed $200m over voters, outspending 48/50 state legislative races on a single question.
That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?
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That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?
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That's a high-stakes question. US workers spent more than a century fighting for basic rights: the right not the maimed, raped or killed on the job; the right to a living wage; the right to a weekend; the right not to be discriminated against based on race or sex or religion.
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Above all: the right to form a union and bargain collectively with employers who otherwise hold all the negotiating leverage - to pool their resources in the same way that gig economy companies did to fund Prop 22.
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There are lots of problems with ad-tech:
* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;
* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;
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* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;
* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;
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* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");
* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and
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* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and
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* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;
That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.
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That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.
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Back in April, Xi Jinping gave a (just released) speech about his "dual circulation" plan for China's economy:
* stimulating consumer spending and reducing China's dependence on trade, and
* increasing other countries' dependence on Chinese tech."
cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/upl…
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* stimulating consumer spending and reducing China's dependence on trade, and
* increasing other countries' dependence on Chinese tech."
cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/upl…
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The strategy speaks volumes about the issues of most urgency in our current political economy, grounded as it is in competing bids to strengthen one's own autonomy while reducing other economic actors' capacity for self-determination.
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Think of California's #Prop22, which stripped employees of the right to organize, to earn minimum wage, or to receive benefits - and gave gig companies the assurance that their power to exploit and abuse workers will never face organized resistance.
pluralistic.net/2020/11/07/oba…
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pluralistic.net/2020/11/07/oba…
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The Obama administration inherited a vast economic crisis. They responded with Quantitative Easing, pumping trillions into the finance sector to rescue the banks that had knowingly gambled on bad mortgages, losing so much they were about to go under.
cnbc.com/2017/11/24/the…
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cnbc.com/2017/11/24/the…
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At the time, deficit hawks predicted inflation, which is a commonsense prediction: inflation is what happens when the amount of money chasing goods and services goes up faster than the supply of those goods and services, creating bidding wars.
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They were right...and wrong. What we got was asset bubbles, especially in housing markets, driving up the price of putting a roof over your head rewarding speculators and landlords, especially Wall Street landlords.
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The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Then Chinese regulators canceled it.
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Then Chinese regulators canceled it.
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As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.
The reality is a lot chewier.
nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/china-…
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The reality is a lot chewier.
nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/china-…
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To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.
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The National @NAACP has released its 2020 policy positions to guide voters' decisions in state and local races.
It does not endorse specific ballot measures, but the positions contrast with some endorsements made by the California @NAACP
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naacp.org/latest/naacp-r…
It does not endorse specific ballot measures, but the positions contrast with some endorsements made by the California @NAACP
THREAD
naacp.org/latest/naacp-r…
National NAACP urges "each state and municipality to reject monetary bail requirements."
California NAACP opposes #Prop25, which would outlaw the use of monetary bail.
California NAACP opposes #Prop25, which would outlaw the use of monetary bail.
National NAACP supports "federal, state, and local legislation that mandates paid sick leave for most workers."
California NAACP supports #Prop22, which would exempt Uber, Lfyt & a few other companies from giving workers paid sick days & family leave.
California NAACP supports #Prop22, which would exempt Uber, Lfyt & a few other companies from giving workers paid sick days & family leave.
If you live in California, you have been blitzed by messages to vote for #Prop22, a rule that would allow Uber, Lyft, Postmates and other money-losing, destructive bezzles to continue to abuse their employees through the fiction that they are "independent contractors."
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Prop 22 is the most expensive ballot initiative in California history, with a pricetag of $186m and counting, money transfered from the never-to-be-profitable app companies that have destroyed so many Californian businesses and lives.
theweek.com/articles/94279…
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theweek.com/articles/94279…
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These companies launched with deep cash reserves from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, and they were a bet that they could monopolize our state's transport, logistics and food by losing money on every transaction until all the real, money-making businesses failed.
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A thread on why Californians need to vote NO on Prop 22.
This is one of the most egregious ballot measures in recent history. UFW knows all too well what happens when labor law carve-outs create a sub-caste of workers vulnerable to exploitation.
This is one of the most egregious ballot measures in recent history. UFW knows all too well what happens when labor law carve-outs create a sub-caste of workers vulnerable to exploitation.
Uber, Postmates, Instacart, and other "gig" companies have spent $186 million to confuse CA voters into supporting Prop 22— by far the most expensive ballot initiative in American history.
That shows how much they have to gain at the expense of workers.
theweek.com/articles/94279…
That shows how much they have to gain at the expense of workers.
theweek.com/articles/94279…
Prop 22 intends to carve out exceptions in CA law AB-5 which requires businesses like Uber to treat workers like normal employees. For example, paying minimum wage.
Take it from us: excluding workers from basic protections is terrible. Vote NO on Prop 22.
prospect.org/labor/how-uber…
Take it from us: excluding workers from basic protections is terrible. Vote NO on Prop 22.
prospect.org/labor/how-uber…
You guys....
I have an article for you to read but you have to read it all. It's important.
See how @LorenaSGonzalez staff, @veenadubal, @davecraige & others are working together to silence those of us who are anti #AB5- "This is significant – we have a PAC opposing Prop 22 coordinating with legislative employees to target political opponents." redstate.com/jenvanlaar/202…
