I share Dubal’s worries about Uber and Lyft’s proposed “workers’ associations” and agree about the indispensable role played by independent, exclusive-representative unions. But I am more open to the possibility that we ought not necessarily reject workers’ associations of the sort being contemplated in the California debates.
The “gig economy” is one place where organizing outside of traditional trade unions is undoubtedly happening in surprising and perhaps unexpected ways. For example, on May 8, 2019, a group of independent app-based drivers in Los Angeles called the LA Rideshare Drivers United organized and launched an unprecedented international picket and work stoppage against Uber…
The CEOs of the two top-competing gig firms—Uber and Lyft—penned a June 12, 2019 OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle in which they claim that after over six years of local, state, federal, and international law-breaking, ignoring the concerns of drivers, and viciously fighting any efforts to achieve living wage and benefits, they are ready…
Khan and Pozen are right to note the fundamental conflict between “information fiduciary” duties and shareholder interests. I only wish to add two further points in service of a radical skepticism towards the information fiduciary concept.
The concept of an “information fiduciary” is a helpful way of describing the privacy interests that users have in data about them held by online platforms. It provides a good starting point for thinking about platforms’ recommendations. And it has nothing useful to say about other urgent problems online platforms pose.
The multiple, capitalist information fiduciaries of the Balkin proposal and the regulatory regime that Khan and Pozen appear to imagine seem to have little in common. But they are responses to the same problem: that of governing data-driven algorithmic processes that operate in real time, immanently, automatically, and at scale.
In recent years, the concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on platform regulation. In a forthcoming essay, we question the wisdom of applying a fiduciary framework to dominant digital platforms.
Technology and automation are key forces spinning workers away from from powerful, resourceful firms into the cracks of the fissured workplace.
About a decade ago, when legal employment dipped sharply, there was a raging debate on the future of the legal profession. Some said the drop reflected a permanent decrease in legal work. The logic here was simple: computers were increasingly capable of completing more sophisticated projects. Having eclipsed paralegals in some document review tasks, they…
This post argues that race and racism are segmenting the new “on demand” labor markets, in ways that facilitate the transition to this new sector of the economy. Scholars of racial capitalism have argued that modern capitalism could never have gotten off the ground without the violence of slave labor in the cotton economy. Violent…
Yesterday morning, tens of thousands of Google employees walked off the job in Dublin, London, Singapore, Zurich, Haifa, Berlin, New York, Ann Arbor, and many other cities. The immediate spark for the protests was revelations that the company had given generous exit packages to a few executives credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including one accused…
In the prior two posts in this set I described how the leading mainstream economic explanation of rising inequality and its primary critique treat technology. Here, what I’ll try to do is synthesize out of the work of many of us in the field an understanding of a political economy of technology that gives technology a meaningful role in the dynamic, but integrates it with institutions and ideology such that it becomes an appropriate site of struggle over the pattern of social relations, rather than either a distraction or a source of legitimation.
Yesterday, I outlined the ways in which the dominant “skills-biased technical change” and “winner-take-all economics” explanations of inequality share an idealized view of both markets and technology as natural and necessary. Today I’ll write about the most influential criticism of these dominant stories that have been developed by labor economists. These focus on the central role that institutional choices played in shaping bargaining power, and through it, the ability of the managerial class and shareholders to cause stagnating wages for the median worker and the great extraction by the 1%.
If we think that that platforms and robots, ubiquitous sensors and algorithms do exert a real influence on the pattern of social relations that make up the economy, but we doubt that technology causes inequality by a “natural” process driven by its own intrinsic affordances and constraints interacting with markets, then we owe ourselves a clearer story than we have given to this point. In today’s post, I’ll describe the limits of the mainstream economists’ answer, which lies at the foundation of “the robots will take all the jobs” and the legitimation of winner-take-all markets.
The concept of ultrahazardous activities, the creation of no-fault workers’ compensation and motor vehicle insurance, and the rise of mass tort litigation can all be partially traced to underlying technological changes and accompanying social shifts. In this post, I will use prior tort law revolutions as a springboard to discuss how new products liability law and fiduciary duties could be used to rectify this new power imbalance and ensure that IoT companies are held accountable for the harms they foreseeably cause.
