Working Life

Soccer, football, whatever you call it—it’s not my thing at all. Give me baseball every day, 365 days a week. But, what is my thing is making sure workers in every sport aren’t exploited—and that has been a reality for years when it came to the rights of workers who worked on the staging of […]

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Thousands of drivers in the app-driven ride service business, principally those who work for Uber and Lyft, just can’t make ends meet—and the whole scramble has created a race-to-the-bottom in which companies impoverish the very people who bring in the cash (sound familiar?). To get an insight into the plight of such drivers, I speak […]

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Yeah, I get it: you like Uber and Lyft because it’s the “new thing” in the app-centered corporate world. But, know this: Uber and Lyft are very bad corporate actors, stomping around the country, using right-wing, anti-consumer, anti-union tactics, to trash fundamental rights in every state—as I learn from Rebecca Smith, co-author of an incredible […]

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Uber or Isis: Which is really a greater threat to the security of millions of people in this country, and around the world? In conversation with national taxi workers advocate Bhairavi Desai and foreign policy expert Phyllis Bennis, I make the point that, by far, the answer is Uber. ISIS is a brutal extremist gang—whose […]

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24 million. Big number. The number of people who will be added to the ranks of those who have no health care coverage. More people will be sicker. More people will go bankrupt. More people will die. I go deep into the “Make America Sick Again” bill, also known as the repeal of Obamacare, and […]

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I’m always been suspicious of the “new economy” gurus who promise that the wonders of technologies will, praise be, free everyone from the chains of hard labor–this was essentially the dumb idea behind Robert Reich’s elitist nonsense about “symbolic analysts” (that was the now-discredited idea he probably thought up after he’d pushed for NAFTA and was looking for another way to promote himself). The economy, and the ability to make a living, is always about the ability of workers to have power over their work life, and leverage power to demand decent wages.

Which is why Uber was just a bunch of new exploitation wrapped in the new lingo of the “sharing economy”. A judge has seen through all that.

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