In this quote unquote advanced Western democracy, we have these people who are really falling through the cracks, except where the cracks were created and maintained by the companies and the regulators.
SPEAKER_00I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Vina Dubal. Vena is an associate professor of law at the University of California Hastings. Her work focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. She's also written for the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, among others. Today we're speaking about how Uber misclassifies its workers and the long fight to get employment recognition for Uber drivers. If you like our conversation, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Make sure to share it on your social media and with any friends or colleagues you think would be interested in our conversation. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this podcast a reality, you can do that by going to patreon.com slash ParisMarks and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. I wanted to start because you've obviously done so much work on Uber and how it uh classifies uh its drivers and kind of the issues that arise with uh the classification of an independent contractor. So I was hoping just you know, as we start off this conversation, if you can explain why it classifies workers that way, what the problem with that is, and how being classified as an independent contractor really affects the workers and denies them of certain rights.
SPEAKER_02Uber, as you said, classifies their workers as independent contractors. In the US, as elsewhere in the world, more so in the US than elsewhere in the world, but a lot of our social benefits and our safety nets come through work. And specifically they come through employment. Um so the idea is if you work for another company, then that company has to provide you with a minimum wage. They have to give you in the US health insurance. We don't have universal health care, they have to pay for unemployment insurance taxes on your behalf to provide workers' compensation so that if you're injured, they can, you know, you're covered. Um everything sort of comes through the medium of the employer. So being an employer is expensive. Um, it is um a responsibility that policymakers have decided to put on corporations that, you know, you're the ones that are making the business decisions, you're the ones who um are deciding where profit goes, and therefore you are going to bear this responsibility. And that's just sort of our political reality. Because it adds about a third to costs overall, to labor costs overall, employers often feel motivated to lower their overhead by trying to misclassify their workers to say we don't have employee workers, we have these sort of independent small businessmen or women or people who are working for themselves, and we just are the middle entity connecting the consumers to the actual small business people. And that is the fiction that the entire gig economy, including Uber, was built on, that somehow Uber, the corporation, is not an employer to all of these drivers, but they are just a platform, a technology platform that connects drivers to writers. And they did that because it massively lowers their costs. I've studied the transportation, um, private transportation ride hail industry for a really long time. And I can tell you that the taxi industry has never been profitable, even with independent contractor drivers without regulations. So without really having a sound idea of what this private transportation ride hailing economy looked like, Uber sort of went in and said, hey, if we just can treat everyone like independent contractors so we don't have to deal with the overhead of labor costs, we can try and create a monopoly in this market and make some money that way. For the drivers, what that has meant is that they have had no access to basic benefits. They haven't had workers' compensation if they're injured, if they're terminated off the app, they have no social insurance, no unemployment insurance. Um, many, many drivers labor without access to the minimum wage, without overtime. And so it like it means that they are just like the definition of precarious worker, they are informal workers laboring in a formal economy. And especially over the last couple of years, as Uber and Lyft have dropped wages for drivers, they've been in really, really bad positions economically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and being an Uber driver is difficult, you know, in good times, right? And as you say, they've experienced cuts to their pay over the course of a number of years now, as Uber has sought to reduce the labor costs because it's found that exactly as you just said, it's finding a hard time to become profitable in this industry. Yeah. And labor is the only place where it can really cut those costs, right? And so obviously that makes it even more difficult on the drivers.
SPEAKER_02And it's ironic, of course, because the drivers are the only people in the company that are actually generating revenue. You know, they are the only profitable part of the company. And so the fact that they are leaving those people out to dry seems to be a particularly sort of cruel, nefarious business decision. Um, I think that their idea at the beginning was, I mean, honestly, if you look at the founders' deck, like their PowerPoint that they used to pitch investors, they really didn't know what they were doing. But I think they had this general sense that this young hip San Francisco consumers wanted to get to their bars faster than they could. So sort of reflecting their own experience.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_02And they um had this idea that if they just undercut the existing right hail industry, the taxi industry, that they could create a monopoly and it would be really easy then to earn profit. And so the model that they have been, and I think that they thought they could do that in, you know, probably under five years, the model, um, what they've found, of course, is that it's much more complicated than that. There are a lot of frictions and what they would call inefficiencies that they hadn't accounted for, including that, you know, when you take on the responsibility as a business of transporting human bodies, there are accidents, there are inherent dangers, and that someone in the ecosphere of that industry has to take the responsibility. So we started seeing problems probably about two years into Uber's, maybe it was just a year into Uber's founding um Uber X, you saw like a young girl in San Francisco dying. She was a five-year-old, she was killed by an Uber driver who was um who was looking for work on I think New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. And it was the first instance, I think, where all of a sudden people in you know the general population who use these services and policymakers and Uber themselves, perhaps, was all of a sudden like, oh, there's a reason that this is a regulated industry. There's a reason that there are protections for consumers and that there are protections for workers. This can be quite dangerous. And their their sort of MO, their, their, their way of dealing with all of this risk has been to insulate themselves by saying, we don't actually have drivers, we have independent contractors. And it is those drivers, these low-income workers who are on the margins of the economy who should bear the risk if someone is injured. It is the low-income immigrant worker who should bear the risk if we terminate them off the app. We Uber bear no responsibility. And that is precisely what this independent contractor model is about. It's about making sure that they don't have responsibility to consumers and they don't have responsibility to drivers. And over the course of the last few years, as they have, as you said, dropped income precipitously for drivers in order to try and turn a profit, it has really backfired on them. Workers who maybe were um okay with their independent contractor status because they were making enough to live and they didn't want to, you know, ruffle any feathers have become so angry at this company that there's sort of a unanimous sense among the workforce that things need to change and they need to change fast.
SPEAKER_00I feel like it's so frustrating because I feel like we see this model kind of repeated over and over again, right? With these founders who don't completely understand an industry that they want to get into, and yet they do, and then they're subsidized by massive venture capital to just kind of go do whatever they want and try to monopolize this industry that they don't completely understand when they get into it, and then that ends up hurting the workers down the line.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. The workers, the consumers, everyone. It's the venture capital model, it's the um it's the Silicon Valley model, and of course, we are seeing it with Instacart, we've seen it with VWork, we see it over and over again. Sort of this mania-fueled idea that someone who has some charisma, oh, Theranos has this idea that they think they can make work, they convince everyone else that it's going to work, and they break a lot of things.
SPEAKER_00Definitely.
SPEAKER_02They break a lot of things in the process, including people's lives.
SPEAKER_00I feel like unfortunately, the aspect of the lives that are lost and that have been lost in Uber's growth was well chronicled in uh Mike Isaac's recent book, super pumped about Travis Kalinick and about the founding of Uber, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And it's really troubling to read, especially in these kind of emerging markets or developing markets where they really did not pay attention to their responsibility to drivers, and you know, a lot of people were put at risk, were harmed, and even were killed as a result of what Uber did in those in those countries.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the things that Uber continues to do in those countries, you know, we see, for example, just in the last six months to a year, Uber rolled out these predatory daylending um practices in India and I think I believe it was Venezuela, um, where they were offering payday loans to drivers through their apps. And then they founded Uber Bank in America and the US, and they started talking about how, oh, well, that we have been experimenting with these payday loans on, you know, these essentially these uh these brown bodies in the global south. And now we're gonna, now that we've perfected the exploitation, we're gonna try and move it into the US. And they received really bad press about it. I don't know that they've they've actually ended up rolling it out in the US or whether they're they're planning on rolling it out in the US, but you can see like the potential for exploitation where because they are just this model that's not profitable, that was sort of ill-conceived, they're just literally rolling around trying to find someplace to lay where they can turn a profit. And so this payday lending model, this idea that again, you know, that they've experimented with in the global south is based in this idea that they know exactly how much people have to earn per day to make a living because they have that data based on how much people work per day before they close the app, before they, you know, throw in their hat for the day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02They know and they control how much those workers make. So if that worker needs a $20 loan, they can actually create the need for a $20 loan and they can actually make them work longer and harder to pay off that loan with interest. Like it is such a potentially extraordinarily exploitative model. Um, and the fact that regulators allowed for um allowed for them to operate and continue it, honestly, in most places to allow for them to operate in the way that they're operating is particularly galling to me. It's particularly sort of tragic.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I completely agree. As you as you describe these things, I'm just like shaking my head like it's so uh it just makes me so angry. And you know, as you say, I definitely want to talk to you about, you know, the regulatory piece of this and how regulators have responded. But before we get to that, obviously we are in the middle of this pandemic right now. Yeah. And that is hitting drivers in particular, right? Absolutely. Because they do have this contractor designation and they deal so much with the public. So in your research, what have you noticed so far in terms of how the pandemic is hitting Uber drivers and you know, gig workers in general?
SPEAKER_02First, I really have to say that I feel your your frustration and anger. I have been, I I mean, I have been angry over the past eight years, ten years, but I am um, I feel really, really furious um since this pandemic has befallen us because I realize the extent to which these companies and the regulators that refuse to hold them accountable are directly responsible for the death of many people in the US and across the world. So we know um, you know, the first few weeks of the pandemic, and actually in just the second week of the pandemic, I had already talked to, you know, I organized with a group of workers in California, the rideshare drivers united, and I was talking to drivers who are in different situations among the RDU members. And, you know, we I spoke with a driver, for example, who has three kids and supports his elderly parents. They live in a low-income, low-income housing in San Francisco, and he had 56 cents in his account and didn't know what was going to happen. They immediately, you know, applied for SNAP for food stamps so that his family wouldn't go hungry, but he he was really unsure of how they were gonna survive in the coming weeks. And it's not just, oh, are we gonna get evicted? It's literally, oh, are we going to physically survive this? What lays ahead for my family? And then I talked to a woman lift driver who is homeless and was homeless as you know, as a result of the gentrification of this area. She got bought out of her apartment. Her apartment building was sold to a new landlord, and they sort of gave everyone a thousand dollars to get out of the place, and she wasn't able to afford a new place. And she had been couch surfing while looking for a new place, and then the pandemic hit, and she was forced to go live with her um her abusive father. Um, and you know, I got a call from her one night and she was in a frantic situation. She had called the police and he was being abusive because he couldn't access his um his therapist because he wasn't, you know, it was again the second or third week. He hadn't gone to see the therapist. And I just thought, wow, like everyone who is already on the verge of a crisis or who is already in a crisis, this is just a crisis on top of a crisis. It's almost inexplicable. Like I cannot, I cannot explain to you the anxiety and the anger and the fear in the voices and the lives of the people that I've been talking to. And then I talked to my friends in New York City right as um as things started to get really bad. And of course, there was, you know, this is this is an occupational hazard. So not only did all of a sudden the work disappear, they probably weren't going to get access to state unemployment insurance, but they also were disproportionately exposed to this virus because they're in these cars with sick people. And so the New York Taxi Workers Alliance director, for example, told me that they had already counted in the second or third week of the pandemic, they had counted something like 25 to 30 of their members had already died.
SPEAKER_00My God.
SPEAKER_02Like this is a particularly kind of intimate service work. And again, like we weren't sure are these how are these people going to survive? They're they've been misclassified as independent contractors. The companies have not been paying into unemployment insurance funds. And then we had, you know, Congress passed um the pandemic unemployment insurance assistance fund, which basically gave everyone, even independent contractors, some form of unemployment insurance. But the problem is that these workers are misclassified. So, for example, in both California and New York, they are eligible for regular state unemployment insurance. They're actually employees for the purposes of unemployment insurance, but the state has to make that decision. And these companies have been lobbying so hard. They've been lobbying Governor Newsom and Governor Cuomo really hard to make sure that the state doesn't treat them like the employees that they are, doesn't give them unemployment insurance. And so a lot of these workers today, to date, I mean, as I talk to you, today is May 20th. We've been in lockdown for, I want to say about eight weeks, seven to eight weeks. And the drivers that I work with in California and folks that I've talked to in New York, most of them have still not gotten their unemployment insurance because of the misclassification, because the state agency has been lobbied to not give them unemployment insurance and also because it takes, they have to investigate because they don't have the data, the companies haven't provided the data like every other uh employer provides data to base their unemployment insurance benefits off of. So the crisis is ongoing and real two months into it. So you have the economic insecurities and you also have the the real physical insecurities. Um, I I talked to one gentleman in the Sacramento area who just he's been he hasn't heard anything still from the state unemployment insurance agency. And so he just like he was like, Well, my life has fallen apart. I've blown through my savings, I have to work, I'm I don't have food. And he started working at um at Costco, and he finally got someone on the phone in this process and they told him, Well, now you're not eligible for unemployment insurance because you're working.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_02And so I mean, like the kinds of uh kinds of situations that that people are finding themselves in are just um are really uh as I said, as I you know, when you first asked the question, are just infuriating. Like in this quote unquote advanced Western democracy, we have these people who are really falling through the cracks, except where the cracks were created and maintained by the companies, and the regulators refused to step in and um and force the companies to follow the law.
SPEAKER_00It's just so disgusting to me to hear you describe that. Like obviously, I I knew pieces of it. I've been following the the reporting, but like to actually hear how it's really impacting people's lives, and you know, I I'm not very familiar with uh the rates of kind of death and infection among Uber drivers. I don't even know if such uh figures have been released, like uh uh you know on a wider scale. But it's uh you know, obviously we're in the middle of this pandemic. It's it's a real crisis for many people. And then because of this classification and because you know, companies like Uber and Lyft, as you say, are lobbying these governors, it's making it so much more difficult for these people who are already struggling, you know, in in normal times, right?
SPEAKER_02Exactly. These are people who are already on the margins of societies that are being pushed further and further and further out. And the and the companies, truly the companies have been lobbying to ensure that workers don't get what they need, because what the workers getting what they need is a pushback against their central business model, which is misclassification.
SPEAKER_00And so obviously what you're talking about there with unemployment is part of this larger fight and this larger recognition of the issue that comes with the misclassification of these drivers. And so over the past year or so, we have started to see some you know progress in terms of challenging that in New York City, or I can't remember if it was New York State, there was a minimum wage uh put in for Uber drivers and restrictions on the number of drivers. But obviously, the the one that a lot of people are watching is happening in California, where you are, where there was Assembly Bill 5, AB5 that was passed that was supposed to make these gig workers into employees, but when it was supposed to take effect you know at the beginning of the year, uh a lot of these gig companies just kind of ignored it and didn't change the classifications. So can you explain what A B five is, the fight that went into even winning just the legislation and how these companies are pushing back against you know making this change that they're now really required to make?
SPEAKER_02A B five is such a big deal, not because of the contents of the law, in my opinion, although that's you know part of it, but also because it is the first time we have seen a willingness on the part of state politicians to stand up to these companies in a really meaningful way and to build a coalition behind their effort to regulate the companies and treat them like they treat other businesses. And so I think that has been really why there's been so much focus on AB5 and so much fascination with it.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02To be honest, when I first heard about Uber Lyft and their their then competitor sidecar back in 2000, I want to say it was 2013, I didn't think that we would get to where we were today. These companies had to violate so many laws to get to where we are today. Um, that if you had asked me then, I would have said, and and I did say this, I it was like, whatever, they'll go away. Like some regulator will rein them in. They're violating state laws, they're violating city laws, they're violating labor laws, they're violating insurance laws, they're violating consumer laws. I was like, there's just no way that this business model is going to last. Um, and you know, they started on the streets of San Francisco, but like lo and behold, with all of the money and all of the resources, hiring literally every lobbyist in the state. Hiring the most ferocious lawyers, they bullied their way into the existence, into having new laws written for them, into having politicians turn their heads when they were violating laws. Even when, you know, even when Sophia Lieu, that little girl who died in um a few years ago at the hands of an Uber driver who was looking for affair, people were just so willing to turn their heads. And anytime a regulator or a politician did try and kind of step up and say, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna try and implement some, you know, any minimal standards here, they would go after them like you wouldn't believe. So you had, you know, the ads against um politicians in California when they tried to get insurance regulations in place. Susan Bonia had just like her her entire district was papered with um with ads showing her to be a um a petulant child saying that she was, you know, she was in the in the hands of unions or whatever. And you had that in, you know, Bill de Blasio similarly was um was peppered with with sort of hate mail um when he tried to do some early regulation in New York. I mean, journalists were followed, and uh we had leaks here and there that the companies were engaging in unscrupulous surveillance of politicians who stood in the way or of academics that stood in the way, or of unions that stood in the way. And so like it was really like a they used their money and their and all of their power to to create this space for themselves. And um, and then around four years ago, we started actually getting, you know, brave journalists started recording what it was like to be a driver, and it started to get more and more and more into um into the public discourse that like maybe this thing that everyone was so excited about isn't so great, that maybe the people who are carrying your body from point A to point B are actually in really precarious situations. Maybe they're being exploited, maybe this industry actually does need some rules. And um, and so there's there was a lot of worker agitation. And I think the the worker agitation is kind of what got the regulators to really start talking about it. Um, and so you know, it's hard for atomized and dispersed workers to organize, um, as you can imagine, um, by design, but you didn't have unions that were willing to really invest a lot of money into organizing the sector because they risked being sued for antitrust violations. Like if these drivers were found to be independent contractors, then the unions could be sued for trying to price fix for you know, trying to get these businesses, these small individual businesses to collude. And so unions were really reticent to step in. Um, in California and New York, you had the New York Taxi Workers Alliance in New York and in California, you had the rideshare drivers united that did a lot where workers were doing self-organizing, where they didn't have anything to lose because they didn't have any money, you know, if they were sued, so what? And so we, you know, we started to see more and more protests, we started to see um even strike attempts, work stoppage attempts. Um, and then something magical just fell into our laps in um I think it was April of 2018. And that was this decision from the California Supreme Court called dynamics. Uh, and dynamics changed the test in California from uh what's known as the control test to the ABC test to define who is an employee. So in most states and in the country, you decide whether someone's an employee by how much of a right to control the employer has. Um, and so all of these years, Uber has been saying, oh, look, we don't control where they go, they decide where they go, they decide when to open the app and when to close the app, and sort of relying on these, I think, really kind of um bad argument, legal arguments for why they are they are not the employer. But frankly, state regulators were afraid to go in and use the existing law because it was going to require a lot of lawyering, you know, the and Uber has a lot of resources. And so even though under the existing California law, and frankly the law of most states, these workers are clearly employees, um, the control test is just ambiguous enough to where it was sort of scaring regulators off from actually doing anything and enforcing the law. And the ABC test, and again, this was this was this decision had nothing to do with the um on-demand platform economy. It was like offline courier work. But they use this disclassification case to say, you know what, this is a little too complicated and doesn't send like a simple signal to the quote unquote marketplace. So we're just going to simplify the test. We already have this ABC test that's been used in other contexts since the 1930s. It's simple. Um the purpose of the laws are to protect working people, and this is this this makes it much more clear. So the California Supreme Court adopted this test, and the central part of the test is control is important, but the most important thing here, uh, employer, is is the worker you're claiming to be an independent contractor, is he doing something different than what you do? And I think these tech companies, they looked at this decision and they said, you know, oh shit. All of these arguments that we've been making about how we don't control our these our drivers, they're not going to fly anymore. The argument is much easier, it's much simpler, it's much harder to get out from underneath. Are these drivers doing transportation work? And are we a transportation company? And so immediately they decided, well, we have so much political power, let's just pass a law that gets us out from underneath this Supreme Court decision. And so, you know, I have to say, like the labor community here, the workers, the drivers, we were all ready to say, okay, well, we're gonna have to fight whatever law they um they try and pass, you know, and um assembly member Gonzalez really turned things around. She said, forget that. This is the law, and we're gonna codify it. We're gonna take the existing law and put it into the statute and we're gonna put them on the defensive. And so instead of our defending the Supreme Court decision, we got to support a bill, Assembly Bill 5. And it's really hard, you know, when it comes down to it, they don't have a lot of arguments. It's really hard to argue against giving workers a minimum wage. Um, and there are not that many people who are gonna who are gonna you know stand up in public comment or go to a go to their their state legislature with a good argument to say that big business shouldn't be providing basic, basic benefits to their workers when you have mom and pop companies that do this, you know, when Walmart does this for God's sake. And so, you know, workers, they were it's just such an amazing story. You know, they were up against this company that has billions of dollars, that has all the lawyers in the world at their fingertips that literally had hired every lobbyist. And they did a number of times caravans up to Sacramento, they did lobby days, um, they they spoke bravely during public comment to have their stories heard, no matter how scared they were that they were going to be retaliated against. Um, they did a global, a global strike. I mean, it blew my mind in um in May of 2019. The Rightshare Drivers United called the strike, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance got behind it. And then you had drivers in Nigeria and India and Brazil all standing up and and going on strike too, engaging in this work stoppage was just like completely remarkable. And um, and the legislature listened. You know, I was I had a baby during this time period. And so after the strike, I sort of I had the baby and and I hadn't been involved in a lot of the um the conversations. You know, I had a, I think it was like maybe five weeks old, a few weeks old at when the law passed, and I had him in my arms and I was watching the bill online, and I just like I just couldn't believe where we had come from lawmakers just refusing to pay any attention um to these like really, really awful stories and um and issues to all of a sudden feeling empowered themselves to stand up to these companies. And the bill passed was like one of the most beautiful things I think I've I've seen in my my many years of um of studying social movements, just to really see the effectiveness um of organizing against big business and having it having it be effective.
SPEAKER_00I absolutely love how you describe that because I feel like watching the kind of organization among gig workers and how they are fighting back against these massive multinational companies with all these billions of VC dollars being thrown at them has been so encouraging, right? Over the past couple of years.
SPEAKER_02It's so amazing, and it's because they have nothing to lose because literally everything has been taken from them. I mean, so many of these workers are even just they're like they're driving to get out from the debt that they've incurred from buying a car under false promises made by these companies, and they literally have nothing to lose. And what's been beautiful about watching them take these risks is also to see the relationships that have formed in the process, you know, like the deep, deep bonds that have been formed between and amongst workers, the kinds of kinship relationships um that have been formed around this kind of class solidarity and solidarity of people wanting to see one another live better lives. It's been really, really inspiring and beautiful.
SPEAKER_00Obviously, I completely agree. Um before I let you go, I did want to ask you about one further thing. Obviously, this this fight isn't over, but this fight also exists in a longer history that you wrote about in Logic magazine recently. So can you talk about how this kind of classification of contractors and what Uber is doing to drivers and trying to take over the taxi industry exists in this longer history of, I guess, kind of uh neoliberalization and kind of capital gaining upper hand against workers within the taxi industry?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so this idea that there is such a thing as an independent contractor for the purposes of basic benefits and and um and social insurance and what have you, is not actually it wasn't a thing when the New Deal was passed in the US in the 1930s. Like the New Deal was really an effort during the Great Depression to um provide all of these basic living standards to all workers. And there wasn't this idea that there were employees and independent contractors for the purposes of safety net benefits, and it was really businesses in the 1940s and the late 1940s that invented this distinction and ultimately had it inscribed into law. Um, and then you know, the one of the first companies to take advantage of the distinction was taxi companies, where it literally um starting in the 1950s, but really meaningfully in the 1970s, you had taxi companies write to the IRS and say, Hey, if we stop providing uh split fare wages to our drivers and instead ask them to pay to work for their shift, can we say that they're contractors for tax purposes? And the IRS wrote back and said, Yeah, sure. So in San Francisco, uh, workers after Yellow Cab went bankrupt because of the corrupt practices of its um of its parent company in San Francisco. When they reopened their doors, they provided um drivers with a contract to sign that said, you are no longer employees. Um, so you lose your union. You are instead independent contractors. And people were like, okay, well, they didn't have a great relationship with the union at that time anyway. They didn't know what, sort of hadn't didn't, I think, think through what it meant to be an independent contractor in terms of safety net benefits. And they were like, you know, I can hustle hard, pay my daily lease to have my taxi, and maybe even make more money than I was making as um as an employee of the company and a union member. And so um a lot of people stayed in the game and it worked because you have these regulations. The fare was regulated, the um supply of taxis were regulated all because of the union. And so, you know, it was precarious, but it it there was some semblance of balance in the industry for many, many, many years until you got Uber and Lyft. And they are, as the taxi workers describe to me, as a sort of more exploitative company, um, a sort of second-stage taxi company, in which the taxi companies, you know, they got rid of their employees and used independent contractors, but they still worked within a regulatory framework, a municipal regulatory framework where supply was curtailed and wages were regulated, um, and so much as fares were regulated, and that and what Uber and Lyft did in Sidecar is they said, well, not only are we gonna get rid of our sort of regulations around workers, we're gonna say that these are independent contractors, but we're also gonna not allow the state to regulate fares. We're not gonna allow the state to regulate competition. And so you have this sort of free-for-all where workers have no way to predict their income because the companies change the their fares willy-nilly, all their fare calculations and their income calculations happen um in a black box. And so there's no no longer a union, there's no longer employment benefits, and there's not these basic regulations. And that is, I think, also why we have seen the amount of regulatory attention in the last year in California over misclassification more broadly, is because these companies massified misclassification. They made it even more precarious in these industries by sloughing themselves with these other regulations. And finally, you know, political actors are are get are catching up and saying, okay, well, we have to do something for public safety and for the safety of labor here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and hopefully they win that fight. But I feel like knowing this history that you're bringing up with how kind of regulation in the taxi industry has evolved over time, and and even just you know, recognizing that kind of piecemeal labor and these sorts of things, you know, have a really long history through capitalism, right? Um, this is not something that's wholly new. And it kind of shows that the claims that Uber and Lyft and these gig companies make that they are offering this really kind of innovative business model that lets people, you know, take control of their own work is just completely false.
SPEAKER_02That's absolutely right. I mean, there is no flexibility in this work. There is no autonomy in this work, as drivers tell me all the time, they have the flexibility to sleep in their car, to eat in their car, to work in their car. They have the autonomy to work frenetically and in a frenzy constantly. All these things about independence, all these tropes of independence and autonomy are false. They're not real. And I think most drivers will tell you that. I do share your skepticism, you know, looking at the history of this, I don't know what's going to happen next. We have AB5, we have the state now trying to enforce A B five. You have venture capitalists, I think, sort of backing down from this business model as a result of these regulations, but I don't know what the next step is. And the only thing that I think workers have control over is their own labor. And I think the only real thing that I can predict moving forward is that there's going to be continued agitation, there's going to be continued labor demands, there are going to be work stoppages, and I think workers are going to become more and more and more strong and more and more and more effective. And, you know, I think only good can come of that.
SPEAKER_00I completely agree. And I think that is a fantastic place to leave it. Vina Duball, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been fantastic.
SPEAKER_02It was a pleasure. Thank you, Paris.
SPEAKER_00Vina Duball is an associate professor of law at the University of California Hastings. You can follow her on Twitter at Vina Dubal. If you liked our conversation, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at at TechWon't Save Us. And you can follow me, ParisMarks, at ParisMarks. Thanks for listening.