The Raging 2020s

by Alec Ross

  When I asked Trumka how unions could combat economic inequality in the 2020s and increase jobs for their members, he said the answer was “to change the labor laws in this country. We have labor laws that were written in 1947—nothing has been static in this country since 1947 except the labor laws.” When I pressed him for more specifics, he pointed to pending legislation that would strengthen penalties for companies that retaliate against workers who organize, expand collective bargaining rights, and weaken so-called right-to-work laws. “You also have to look at the trade laws, you have to look at the tax laws, you have to look at all the economic rules that have been written,” he added.

  He’s not wrong, but the fact that you have to, in his words, “look at all the economic rules that have been written” and rewrite labor laws that have not changed in seventy-five years highlights not just how much dramatic change is needed, but also how little progress Trumka and his peers have made in the last few decades.

  We stood together by his window so he could show me his dramatic, unobstructed view of the White House, and he told me, “When people talk about inequality they only talk about inequality of income. We talk about it in three levels: inequality of income, inequality of opportunity, and inequality of power. And unless you solve the inequality of power, you’ll never solve the inequality of income and the inequality of opportunity. So right now we have an economy that is on a trajectory towards implosion. If inequality continues to grow, the system will implode.”

  Trumka held up his Apple iPhone and remarked, “We don’t get the benefit of this telephone. Every component in that telephone was made with taxpayer dollars, every component in that phone. Now you can argue, ‘well you get the benefit of a good phone, if you can afford it,’ but they’re making a whole lot of money. And the taxpayers aren’t getting any of it back. So what does society do? Let’s decide how we make sure that those benefits of increased productivity from future technology get shared equitably and fairly with the stakeholders. Because if we don’t, the day of implosion is closer, not farther away.”

  His diagnosis about power was exactly right; his desire to bring the stakeholders back in was exactly right. But as I looked at Trumka’s view of the White House and Washington and as I walked past the massive mural after our interview, it felt disconnected. There was something wrong, and ineffective, about how Trumka and the big unions have tried to accumulate and exercise power. In the thirty-five years Trumka has been the president of a union, he has played the insider’s game. He attends the World Economic Forum in Davos every year, and while in Washington he frequents the Hay-Adams, a power-meal mecca with twenty-five-dollar lobster omelets on the menu. (In fairness, he notes it’s a union shop.) He’s making a mistake to think that you have to wear the camouflage of the corporate elite to get the C-suite and the halls of Congress to respond to you. It’s the opposite. In my experience, with every mouthful of lobster omelet in Washington and canapé in Davos, the union leaders lose their edge. They are dulled. They are members of the Davos crowd, but junior members. And as the world has become more winner-take-all, Trumka’s thirteen million workers have seen their power steadily slide.

  Compounding the challenge for Trumka’s members is that globalization and technological change are both changing their status as workers, since it has changed the very nature of work. Jobs are becoming more mobile and short-term. Young people today are more likely to have thirty employers over thirty years than a single employer for their whole career. As technology evolves, workers must constantly update their skill sets. Many of the jobs that will be most in demand in the year 2050 do not even exist yet. Gone are the days when a single set of skills in a single trade could reliably sustain a worker through her entire career.

  Instead of fighting to maintain the status quo, unions must position their members to embrace the change. As low-skill industrial jobs went overseas, unions missed the first wave of opportunities to retrain their members for the high-skill, technology-driven jobs that remain firmly planted in the United States. But they can still reorient to provide such services. Many workers would not even need to switch industries—by 2028, researchers estimate, there will be 2.4 million manufacturing jobs in the US that companies cannot fill due to a skills shortage within the workforce. To succeed in the 2020s and beyond, workers are learning to adapt—and unions can adapt in turn to provide resources that will help workers take charge of the future.

  “We see people thinking that the solution is to go back to the manufacturing era model, and really trying to re-create that—I don’t think you can,” said Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union, a nonprofit that provides health insurance and other benefits for freelance workers. “We’re at a moment where we don’t have the future figured out, but we can clearly see that it can’t just be the past.”

  The same problems are just as visible across the pond as they are in the United States. Britain was home to some of the very first modern labor unions, but the Conservative government led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher weakened unions during the 1980s, and they never recovered. Today only 14 percent of British private-sector workers belong to a union.

  When I spoke with Paddy Lillis, the general secretary of the United Kingdom’s 450,000-member Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW), his plans for the future were uninspiring. USDAW represents a range of workers, from delivery drivers, butchers, and meatpackers to retail employees and workers in call centers. One of its primary organizing tactics involves leafleting local shopping centers with literature on the demise of brick-and-mortar retail. Though a time-honored strategy, leafleting does not scale like Amazon and Alibaba or persuade like social media.

  The relative progress that Lillis cited meant sitting on committees and having conference calls with people in government. He excitedly noted that the prime minister had name-checked his union. It was all process and protocol, not actual results that required more than an acknowledgment of his union’s existence. Organized labor needs new strategies for mobilizing workers and new demands to bring to the table.

  To that end, grassroots organizations in the United States are starting to experiment with a new approach.

  A LITTLE BIT OF PROMISE

  The nature of work in the 21st century is not for traditional unions. Historically, organizing tactics relied on physical proximity and derived strength from numbers. It is easier to mobilize a strike or build support for a union in a large workplace with lots of employees, like a coal mine or an auto plant, than among workers scattered across branch offices, franchise restaurants, and chain stores. If people do not stand shoulder to shoulder on the job, they are less willing to do so on the picket line.

  The proximity problem is amplified when businesses outsource operations to contingent workers, freelancers, and independent contractors. These “alternative work arrangements” offer workers more flexible hours and commitments, but they also let companies avoid extending them certain benefits and protections available to full-fledged employees. Contract workers can be found everywhere. They include nearly all the baggage handlers and skycaps at airports, about one in three construction workers, and more than half the employees at Google. Others work in the platform economy, earning money through digital platforms like Uber, Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. We will call these various forms of independent employment gig work.

  Gig work comes in many different forms, which makes it difficult to measure the exact number of gig workers. The US Department of Labor reports that approximately 10 percent of American workers rely on an “alternative work arrangement” as their primary job, while the Federal Reserve estimates 30 percent of US workers participate in some form of gig work.

  When people talk about independent employment, they usually jump straight to the on-demand labor force enabled by companies like Uber, Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. While this is the most visible form of gig work, less than 2 percent of the US labor force make their living through this “
electronically mediated work,” though the number is higher if you count people who use the platforms as a side hustle. Still, this piece of the job market epitomizes the decentralized workforce. Anyone who has worked through one of these platforms knows it is a solitary affair. You have no coworkers. You set your own hours. You interact with the company only when something goes wrong with the app. For the most part, your marching orders—and your pay—are dictated by software.

  But just as technology platforms developed this new way to work, their contractors are pioneering new ways to organize.

  On August 22, 2017, more than one hundred Uber and Lyft drivers gathered outside Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to protest for higher wages. In their effort to lower costs for passengers, the companies had reduced the pay rates for drivers. Between 2013 and 2017, rideshare drivers across the country had seen their monthly earnings fall more than 50 percent.

  “Most of us as drivers spend anywhere from 10 to 12 to 15 hours a day in our car six and seven days a week,” one protestor told reporters. “We have families that we never see. We have homes that we never see … Uber pays us 67 cents a mile, sticks us in traffic and expects us to come up to this airport after sitting up there for an hour to pick up a passenger going to Playa Vista for four dollars. I’m going to ask you, what is your time worth?”

  Like many other grassroots initiatives, the protest was organized through a Facebook page. In the following months, the organizers of the event came together to form a new group called Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), with the goal of improving pay and work conditions for Uber and Lyft drivers. To advance the cause, the group needed to build its membership, and that required connecting with drivers who could go days without crossing paths with their fellow gig workers. In short, RDU needed to solve the proximity problem.

  To do so, the organizers turned to technology. If they were working through an app, why not strike through an app?

  With the help of a freelance developer named Ivan Pardo, the group created an app that served as a one-stop shop for recruiting new members. Through the app, organizers scheduled calls with drivers, communicated with them through encrypted channels, rated their interest in the organization, and gauged their feelings toward company policies. But even with the app, the group still needed a way to connect with more drivers. It found the solution in Brian Dolber.

  Dolber describes himself as a scholar-activist. With a bushy beard, receding hairline, thick-framed glasses, and the wardrobe of a disheveled academic, he looks the part. Dolber started driving for Uber on and off between 2015 and 2017. Like many gig workers, he had a day job. Dolber worked as an adjunct professor at California State University San Marcos and was in the process of writing a book on Jewish labor organizing in the early 20th century. Most adjunct faculty—the independent contractors of academia—earn less than $35,000 per year. With his class schedule changing each semester, Dolber needed some extra cash. He also saw rideshare driving as a research opportunity—what better way to study the gig economy than to join it? So off he went in his silver Honda Civic, shuttling passengers around the concrete jungle of Los Angeles County.

  Dolber first learned of Rideshare Drivers United at an academic conference. He decided to attend one of its meetings in Los Angeles, and while there he crossed paths with Ivan Pardo. By that point, the organization had connected with only about five hundred of the estimated three hundred thousand rideshare drivers in California. Because Uber and Lyft publish only sparse data on their contractors, identifying and contacting new drivers was a laborious process. Up to that point, the group had recruited most of its members by canvassing parking lots at LAX. However, Dolber and Pardo developed a more scalable strategy for picking out rideshare drivers: Facebook.

  “Facebook is able to identify drivers better than anybody else,” Dolber said. “They know who drivers are because they have the app downloaded on their phone. It’s not that people are necessarily identifying themselves [as rideshare drivers]. On Facebook itself, they’re figuring out who drivers are … and then [targeting] them with ads.”

  Armed with an academic grant, Dolber and Pardo set out creating a Facebook ad campaign to target rideshare drivers across Los Angeles. The strategy was simple: when users clicked the ad, they were directed to the Rideshare Drivers United website and invited to join the group. Volunteers then used the app to contact interested drivers and discuss how they could get involved.

  As a professor, Dolber ran the campaign with academic precision. Between October 2018 and January 2019, the group recruited 1,147 new drivers, more than doubling its membership. By the end of the campaign, the organization was spending about seventy-three cents for each new recruit. At the same time, the group had more than 1,400 members weigh in on different policies they would like to change in the rideshare industry. Leaders tailored their platform, the Drivers Bill of Rights, based on the responses they received from drivers.

  “One of the big problems in organizing in the gig economy is that there’s no central space … no factory floor where workers meet. Social media has provided an outlet for that,” Dolber told me. But while technology can enable an organization, he noted it is not a substitute for motivated members.

  “We’ve been able to bat above our weight in relation to what other unions would expect to have in terms of their numbers relative to the workforce. The trick has been to use the technology as a tool … to actually build the relationships. We don’t work because of the technology, we work because we actually have some really good organizers who are putting in a lot of time and effort, and because the drivers are pissed. I think the technology in some ways has become a necessity because the gig economy disperses workers. It makes sense that a technology that allows for that disbursement then allows for them to reconnect.”

  By March 25, 2019, Rideshare Drivers United had grown to three thousand members. After Uber reduced per-mile pay for Los Angeles–area drivers by 25 percent, the group mobilized a citywide strike. Thousands of drivers participated, and hundreds formed a picket line outside the company’s LA office. Within weeks, RDU had welcomed 1,300 new members to its ranks. On May 8, 2019, days before Uber was set to make its initial public offering, RDU spearheaded a nationwide strike. Tens of thousands of drivers logged off the platform. Rallies were held in major cities like Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, and even spread to the United Kingdom.

  On May 10, its first day as a publicly traded company, Uber saw its share price drop more than 7 percent. In terms of dollars lost by investors, it was the worst IPO since 1975. Lyft had not fared much better when it had gone public a few months earlier. To be fair, there are other factors that contributed to the company’s poor performance—for one, Uber has never turned a profit. But having your workers walk off the job by the thousands does not exactly look good to investors.

  In some ways, that was the point of the strike. Unlike the strikes of the 20th century, which centered on bringing work to a halt or damaging a company’s bottom line, modern collective action is just as focused on publicity and its impact on a company’s brand and perception by the investment community, leading to a higher or lower stock price. Thanks to digital media, a relatively small strike or protest can get lots of attention. In 1936, GM workers needed to bring car production to a halt to make their voices heard. Today, a few viral news stories can fuel a cause. A day of nationwide strikes will also do more to change public opinion than handing out leaflets.

  “I think a lot of the drivers want to impact the bottom line … but I don’t think that’s actually how these companies are organized or necessarily how we can best impact them,” Dolber said. “We were able to create enough of a buzz that it scared the investors. The investors don’t necessarily need everyone to walk out. They need to have the news story be … this is a dangerous business model and the workers are upset.”

  While RDU’s tactics are instructive, one of the difficult
realities for its movement is that some of its demands—even perfectly understandable ones—are not possible for Uber to meet. There are real changes that can be enacted for drivers, such as policies to mirror the protections already in place for traditional workers, like pay transparency, an appeal process for drivers who get kicked off the platform, and the right to organize without retaliation. But when you look at more impactful changes, like classifying drivers as actual employees, or raising wages substantially—these would very likely send Uber into bankruptcy. For instance, Uber has more than 3.9 million drivers worldwide; if those workers were classified as employees, the company would be the largest employer in the world, ahead of the US Department of Defense, the People’s Liberation Army of China, and Walmart. As of this writing, Uber is a money-losing company: without coming close to these changes, it lost more than $8 billion in 2019. Its business model cannot handle many of the real labor protections we see in other fields. If either the much higher wage or the reclassification of workers as employees were enacted, the company would either serve just the wealthier black-car passengers of its origins or go out of business entirely.

  But if the gig economy is any indicator of the many jobs emerging in the 2020s and beyond, we as a society must determine what to do about this paradox. We need to determine what rights and protections will extend to the “alternative work arrangement” workforce and what will be provided by the employer and what will be provided by government. If a company with a business model like Uber’s cannot provide all its employees with a living wage and decent benefits, there are essentially four choices left.

  Compel benefits irrespective of the business model. Gig work like ridesharing then reverts to the black-car model of its roots rather than functioning as a service for the masses.

  Government fills the gap with a higher and stronger safety net.