Thread by @doctorow

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.

1/

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.

2/

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.

3/

The situation became clearer when we learned that $95k was funneled to a "consultancy" run by CA NAACP chair Alice Huffman to sell Prop 22. Huffman resigned on news that her firm raked in $1.7m to "consult" on ballot initiatives in 2020.

latimes.com/california/sto…

4/

A new investigative story in @themarkup by @darakerr and @tenuous reveals a vast corporate dark-money operation that spent millions to make Uber and Lyft seem like paragons of racial justice.

themarkup.org/news/2021/06/1…

5/

They reveal over 30 orgs from communities of color that took donations from Uber and Lyft's PACs and subsequently came out against state and city initiatives to ban worker misclassification and secure benefits and protections for precarious workers.

github.com/the-markup/inv…

6/

These orgs published op-eds endorsing worker misclassification as a way for "independent workers to stay independent," placing them in respected Black papers like the Chicago Crusader, Latinx papers like El Dia, and mainstream papers.

7/

Many of these op-eds were identical, not marked as press releases, and with no disclosure of the financial relationship between the gig companies they defended and the organizations who convinced the papers to run the "editorials" (some ran anonymously, without bylines).

8/

More remarkable than the orgs that have taken Uber and Lyft's money and then joined their "coalitions" are groups that were added to these coalitions without ever agreeing to do so, like Groundwork Buffalo, PUSH Buffalo, Open Buffalo, and Coalition for Economic Justice.

9/

These campaigns are orchestrated by PR firms like Hilltop Public Solutions, who boast of their "grasstops solutions” that help “clients inject their voices into local policy debates."

10/

This kind of Orwellian language is shot through the pro-misclassification campaigns, which are styled as "protecting worker independence" (independence from health care, workplace safety, a minimum wage, a pension...)

11/

It's hard to overstate how corrosive this is, how it discredits the hard work of community groups and plays into cheap cynicism.

12/

I've worked for a nonprofit off and on for 20 years and I've lost track of the number of people who've called us "shills" because sometimes the principles we fight for align with the actions of companies and we support them.

13/

The fact that we also fight them - sue them! - when they don't live up to those principles gets missed out, creating a cheap, cynical discourse that demoralizes the public and activists alike.

14/

One of history's most wicked acts of political genius came from Vladislav Surkov, who designed Putin's comms strategy. Surkov cheerfully admitted that he had set up and created some of the anti-Putin opposition groups and funded them - but never said which groups were fakes.

15/

Surkov created a situation where no one knew if they were among committed activists - or just a patsy for a false-front group. It's a scorched earth tactic, one that demolishes the possibility of genuine social movements.

theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

16/

That's the Lyft/Uber playbook: not just to create the appearance that the workers they prey on enjoy it - but to annihilate the possibility that ANY community group will be taken seriously.

eof/

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/2021/06/19/dyn…