Nov 8, 2023
While the rapid increase in app-based jobs around the world offers millions of workers additional avenues to ear money, it also creates new opportunities for employer exploitation through low wages, lack of health care and an absence of job safety–and that means unions must take action, says Sarah McKenzie, Solidarity Center program coordination director.
“If we’re going to make sure that workers’ rights are upheld and that we continue to create decent workplaces, we’ve got to care. We’ve got to care about where the work is going and where the workers are,” she says.
In the final episode of The Solidarity Center Podcast series, My Boss Is A Robot, Solidarity Center Executive Director and Podcast Host Shawna Bader-Blau speaks with two Solidarity Center union organizers to explore strategies for ensuring a decent future of work for delivery drivers and others engaged in platform-based jobs.
“Employers will continue to shift more and more toward this organization of work if they think it’s a way to avoid having to be accountable to their workers, a way to avoid labor unions,” says Andrew Tillet-Saks, Solidarity Center organizing director. “So I think in terms of trying to build the whole global labor movement, it’s really the nut that the global labor movement has to crack.”
Throughout the six-part My Boss Is a Robot series, app-based drivers and experts highlight the precarity of work through platforms, where algorithms are the new face of an old scourge: the bad boss. Download this episode and the full My Boss Is a Robot series here or at Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
Oct 25, 2023
Despite unfair working conditions, many gig workers need to be convinced to join together in unions or associations to more effectively advocate for basic benefits granted to employees in traditional jobs. On the latest episode of the Solidarity Center Podcast series My Boss Is a Robot, union organizers in the Philippines talk about how they reach workers who believe that they should not—or cannot—–stand up for their rights on the job.
“Many riders thought that we don’t have any labor rights,” John Jay Chan tells Podcast Host and Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau. Chan, a delivery driver, is helping organize app-based food delivery drivers through RIDERS-SENTRO. Launched in 2022, the union has established four chapters in multiple cities and islands and is mobilizing drivers in another 15 cities, while navigating an environment where red-baiting of unions is common and where union members are often threatened, harmed or murdered.
Yet Chan and Josua Mata, SENTRO secretary general, say one of their biggest hurdles is getting drivers to understand they are not freelance workers with no rights but employees of corporate giants that “have effectively disguised the employee-employer relationships that they have with their riders,” says Mata.
“Essentially every rider, whether they’re considered a freelance rider, independent contractor, actual employees of the platform, has to enjoy the rights that every single worker enjoys in this country,” he says. Working with the drivers, the union crafted a Charter of Rights that lists basic rights for gig workers: a minimum wage, a written contract, health or accident insurance, and access to the country’s social security services. The Senate is now considering the bill. The Charter itself provides a focal point for organizing more drivers.
For union organizers, reaching app-based workers with no central workplace and employers who refuse to acknowledge their role requires new approaches. Says Mata: “We in SENTRO will never claim that we know the proper strategy now. We’re practically experimenting. We’re testing everything.” Download The Solidarity Center Podcast to find out more about SENTRO’s strategies for organizing delivery drivers.
“My Boss Is a Robot” is a six-part series that seeks to shine a light on the behind-the-scenes practices of app companies that exploit workers in the global gig economy. Download the latest episode, Tips to Help Delivery Drivers Form Unions, and watch for the final episode on November 8.
Listen to this episode and all Solidarity Center episodes here or at Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
Sep 27, 2023
Food delivery and passenger service drivers and are forced to follow the company apps. But if apps miscalculate and send drivers in the wrong direction, or lower wages for drivers stuck in traffic, it’s the driver who loses wages, or is even booted from the platform. The latest episode of My Boss Is a Robot shows that for app-based companies, these are not bugs–they are built into an algorithmic system designed to move money from workers and into the pockets of the rich corporate bosses.
From Thailand, delivery driver Niap Chunti Ta Kai See Kun tells Podcast Host and Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau that the app often shows his destination far closer than it really is–sometimes indicating a route straight through buildings.
“The distance in the Google Map, for an example, is five kilometers, but the distance in the application map is always shorter, like three kilometers,” he says. “I think that’s not a mistake, they intend to do that because that will reduce the pay and that will reduce the cost for the application. The shorter the distance, the less they have to pay us. But the longer the distance, the more they have to pay us.”
Drivers also work long hours and rush between deliveries because if they don’t, the app punishes them by lowering pay.
“And that’s why you see some drivers died on the wheel,” says Lawal Ayobami, an app-based driver in Nigeria. “There was no rest for the driver. They don’t even go to their family. They’re on the road because they want to make money.”
Delivery Drivers Stand Up for Their Rights
Delivery drivers around the world are standing up for their rights: Earlier this year, Nigeria’s Ministry of Labor recognized the Amalgamated Union of App-Based Transport Workers of Nigeria after delivery drivers organized in cities across the country.
“That means workers like Ayobami will begin to get the protections and benefits they deserve in this highly unregulated and informal sector,” says Bader-Blau.
“My Boss Is a Robot” is a six-part series that seeks to shine a light on the behind-the-scenes practices of app companies who exploit workers in the global gig economy. Download the latest episode, Gaming the System: App Workers Rarely Win, and watch for the next episode on October 11.
Listen to this episode and all Solidarity Center episodes here or at Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
Sep 13, 2023
For many job seekers, joining the ranks of delivery drivers or other app-based workers is sold as entrepreneurship–a way to make money as an independent contractor and be their own boss. But the reality is much different, as workers from Africa to Latin America have found out.
“Just in Latin America, we see millions of [app-based] workers who are exploited, who are working injured, who don’t even have a minimum salary guaranteed, who are risking their life every day with no guarantees whatsoever because the company can terminate them if they deem that they’re not meeting certain standards,” says Mery Laura Perdomo, a lawyer for the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW), a Solidarity Center project.
Perdomo and other experts joined Solidarity Center Podcast Host Shawna Bader-Blau on App Workers Seek Level Playing Field, the second episode of “My Boss Is a Robot,” to discuss how delivery drivers and other app-based workers are excluded from basic labor protections because companies have classified them as “independent contractors”–all while enforcing rules and requirements as in a standard workplace.
But even as app companies around the world have waged multimillion dollar campaigns to prevent court decisions or legislation that would classify gig workers as employees, delivery drivers are standing up for their rights on the job.
Explore their battle for fair treatment as they seek to be recognized by companies as the employees they really are.
“My Boss Is a Robot” is a six-part series that seeks to shine a light on the behind-the-scenes practices of app companies who exploit workers in the global gig economy. Download the latest episode, App Workers Seek a Level Playing Field, and watch for the next episode on September 27.
Listen to this episode and all Solidarity Center episodes here or at Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
Sep 7, 2023
If you work seven days a week, 12 hours a day and don’t make enough money to pay the bills, you can talk to your boss, right? Not if your boss is an app.
“My Boss Is a Robot,” a new series on The Solidarity Center Podcast, explores the challenges delivery drivers around the world face as they navigate not only dangerous traffic but a workplace where algorithms arbitrarily determine wages, hours and working conditions.
In the first episode, “21st Century Workplace: Exploitation by App,” Solidarity Center Executive Director and podcast host Shawna Bader-Blau talks with Yuly Ramírez, a delivery driver in Ecuador, who worked for Uber and Glovo.
“We used to have a base salary of $1 per hour,” says Ramírez. “Our rates were cut down almost by half. We found out that we could not make nearly as much as we were making before, not even working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.”
The episode also features Arianna Jiménez, a scholar who interviewed app-based drivers in Colombia, most of whom are migrants seeking opportunities to support themselves and their families. Jiménez discusses the vast profits of delivery corporations like Rappi in Latin America, which bases its business model on workers forced to work harder for lower and lower wages.
“They’re gaining profit from all sides and maximum cost is transferred to the individual,” says Jiménez.
“Exponential growth without investment in its workforce,” says Bader-Blau. “And, recently, during the worst parts of the pandemic in Colombia, Rappi made its drivers compete for vaccines, if you can believe it.”
App-Based Exploitation Doesn’t Stop at the Border
As the series shows, app-based workers from Thailand to Colombia face the same exploitative working conditions, as a new form of Gilded Age workforce repression spreads globally.
But like the early industrial era, delivery drivers and other app-based workers are standing up for their rights. Across Latin America, for instance, workers have been staging organized protests as early as 2018, and in Nigeria, delivery drivers formed the country’s first union of app-based workers. The series will conclude with two episodes on worker organizing in this growing industry.
Download 21st Century Workplace: Exploitation by App and watch for the next episode on September 13.
Listen to this episode and all Solidarity Center episodes here or at Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
