Thread by @doctorow

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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The PRO Act doesn't just restore the labor rights that have been stripped away from American workers - it also creates new protections to address the epidemic of worker misclassification where "gig economy" employees are falsely characterized as "independent contractors."

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The gig companies - who use worker misclassification to pay sub-minimum-wage salaries and deny basic workplace protections - spent $200m to pass California's #Prop22. Immediately, bosses fired their union workers and replaced them with gig workers.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man…

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Companies like @Uber and @lyft have already showered $1.2m in a matter of weeks on DC politicians, lobbying against the PRO Act. That's not surprising, but what is interesting is their SEC-mandated disclosures about what they expect from the PRO Act:

theintercept.com/2021/05/06/pro…

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“If a significant number of Drivers were to become unionized and collective bargaining agreement terms were to deviate significantly from our business model, our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flows could be materially adversely affected...

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"In addition, a labor dispute involving Drivers may harm our reputation, disrupt our operations and reduce our net revenues, and the resolution of labor disputes may increase our costs." -@Uber.

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This is a very frank admission of what's at stake here. Corporations understand that the market allows companies to claim an ever-larger share of the proceeds of workers' labor, and that the only way to reverse that lopsided distribution is for workers to organize.

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They acknowledge that when workers speak directly to customers about their labor conditions and withhold their labor in the face of unfair practices, corporations suffer - that is, the corporations win when workers are powerless and customers are ignorant.

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Passing the PRO Act will not be easy. Establishment Dems like Mark Warner have signalled that they will side with bosses over workers on this bill.

discourseblog.com/mark-warner-pr…

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Warner falsely claims that the bill will take away the right of gig workers NOT to be unionized. This is just not true, as @MorePerfectUS reminds us: "This lets independent contractors join a union. It doesn’t force them to."

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1389587206298341382

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The entire gig economy runs on idiotic lies like this one. Take the premise that workers are independent, organized into "two-sided markets" by apps that match workers and work, and that manage the process with cool, machine-like objectivity.

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As is always the case with #DisciplinaryTechnology, the gig work app isn't actually in charge - it's just a convenient way for human beings to hide their sadistic behavior behind a scrim of technology theater.

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Think of Amazon Delivery Service Partner (DSP) drivers. Amazon maintains the pretense that these workers aren't employees OR contractors - they say that they're SUBcontractors, working for "entrepreneurs" who contract with Amazon to make deliveries.

pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the…

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DSP drivers wear Amazon uniforms and drive vans with the Amazon logo. They are surveilled by multiple interior and exterior cameras that track their location, their driving, and (checks notes) their facial expressions?!

wired.com/story/some-ama…

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Amazon gives its 2,500 DSP owners impossible delivery goals, and the DSP owners pass those on to their 158,000 drivers. This is why drivers have to piss and shit in bags in their trucks, a fact that Amazon denied even though they knew it was true:

theguardian.com/technology/202…

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But for all the electronic monitoring and micromanaging that DSP drivers endure, the exploitation they face is anything but automated. When DSP drivers are forced to work in dangerous and inhumane conditions, it's because human beings are imposing that on them.

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Remember all those apps that monitor drivers? The DSP owners instruct their drivers to turn them off whenever there's a delivery crunch, and then order drivers to proceed at unsafe speeds on residential streets to make Amazon's quotas:

vice.com/en/article/xgx…

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Workers who refuse to drive unsafely are disciplined and fired (those automated systems ensure that there's always some excuse for firing a worker, and the worker's misclassification as an independent contractor means they have no recourse in the face of unjust dismissals).

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Amazon says this is all the work of rogue contractors, and not the result of its impossible quota system.

Worker misclassification lets Amazon have its cake and eat it too - force workers to shit in bags and risk their lives driving too fast, and then claim innocence.

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Worker protections start with being recognized as a worker. Ending worker misclassification isn't incidental to the PRO Act, it's at its heart: without it, every worker who stands up for their rights will be reclassified as a contractor and crushed.

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Image:
Kheel Center
flickr.com/photos/kheelce…

CC BY
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…

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ETA - 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/2021/05/07/pro…