#109: Gig Worker Politics, Performing @ Work & Thoughts From The Road v2
😷 Thoughts on life. work & what matters
September 26th, 2020 - Greetings from Sedona! This week is another shorter edition of the newsletter with some random thoughts from the road and a couple links. Apologies to the paid subscribers who might be receiving this twice.
This shot is from Horeshoe Bend in Arizona.
#1 Politics & The Gig Worker 🚖
Venkatesh Rao’s assessment of the California battles over AB5 and Prop 22 is the best thing I’ve read about the the battle over the future of the gig economy. It correctly identifies one issues that rarely gets discussed discussed:
The government trying to morph everyone into a full-time worker because that is the way they think about power, control, taxes & votes.
For anyone that has spent more than a month in the gig economy, you realize that the issue with gig work is not that you lack the benefits of full-time employment, its that the whole system is designed to make gig work harder and less preferential.
Here is vgr:
The attempt, by traditional labor ideologues, to pretend that the freedom of the gig economy is some sort of false consciousness, or that everybody in it is really actually yearning for the security of a paycheck job and is being coerced by Evil Corporations to pretend otherwise, is gaslighting pure and simple.
Similar to him, I’ve been more sympathetic to the arguments of the rideshare companies, but only in the sense that the politicians seem to have no understanding of why anyone would pursue gig work in the first place.
Despite being sympathetic, its clear that the rideshare CEOs are omitting any sore of plan other than trying to shut down these recent moves by California. This makes sense from a business standpoint - never negotiate away anything before the negotiation begins. I do hope that something like Rao proposes, what he calls the “Actual Plan,” will begin to emerge.
Actual Plan™
Clean up the shady capitalization that is distorting the prices of rides/deliveries
Compensate drivers for the value of the data they generate
Make the dispatching algorithms auditable and/or open source
Create room for drivers to differentiate and earn a premium
Give drivers a piece of the equity upside of the trend towards driverlessness
Harnessing the power and dynamism of the gig economy and giving those workers potential upside in the success of the system seems to be something that would be great for the overall health of the economy and good for gig workers.
The problem? Politicians don’t like people that can’t be easily counted:
Unlike most valuable political constituencies, we are not legible, concentrated, and easy to target and activate for political purposes. We also do not have a sufficiently cohesive and predictable set of political attitudes or interests. Our interests cannot be summarized in a single, simple political message that a politician could ride to power.
James Scott mentioned a similar thing in his book Seeing Like A State:
To the degree that the institutional arrangements can be readily monitored and directed from the center and can be easily taxed (in the broadest sense of taxation), then they are likely to be promoted.
It has been striking to notice how unified full-time workers seem to be in the political ideas they gravitate to compared to people in the gig economy. In the gig economy, people seem to be a little more practical with their political attention “just give me better healthcare and let me do my work!”
Many of the ideas about how to “fix” the gig economy are written by full-time employees. Full-time politicians, full-time researchers at the Aspen Institute, or full-time journalists. They all rightly point out issues, but struggle to see past their own fear of not being fully employed for their entire life to see the dynamism, optimism and energy that exists in all domains of the gig economy.
We’d probably get to a better outcome and faster if all those people spent a year working in the gig economy.
For now, they should read this essay and Venkatesh’s writing at the Art of Gig - increasingly the best writing of what I’ll call the “soul of the gig economy”
#2 Thoughts from the Road 🛣
Utah is another planet - I’ve only been to Salt Lake City via air so was surprised as I drove through Utah and experienced what felt like arriving on another planet. Driving through massive canyons and red rock creations, I lost all desire to ever travel to Mars.
Large college towns are unlike everything else - We’ve walk through the campus towns of Boulder, CO, Charlottesville, VA and Lawrence, Kansas and it is striking how much cleaner and nicer these towns feel than the surrounding areas.
These towns have benefited from the perfect storm of guaranteed loans and the modern social ethic but felt underutilized, especially without groups gathering across campus. In addition to the valid criticisms of the education-government complex, it would be great to see more ideas of how these towns could expand, accept outsiders and become important cities of the future.
There are so many impressive drives in the US - I hope I don’t have to drive across Kansas again, but have been surprised multiple times at what we found across the US. From driving through the Smoky Mountains to yesterday’s descent into Sedona via the Coconino forest, I found myself saying “wow” more times than I could count.
Zion, Bryce and Arches are 💯 - I hope to come back and spend many more days in each park. The scale, wonder per square foot and energy of these parks is hard to describe.
#3 At Work, We Are Performers 🏀
I re-read this essay about Kevin Love, an NBA player and some of his challenges he had from a mental health standpoint.
my entire identity was tied to one thing in a really unhealthy way. Way before I was in the NBA or even in college, my self-worth was all about performing. I was what I did, which I think a lot of people can relate to, whether they’re a chef or a lawyer or a nurse or whatever the profession. I just happened to play basketball.
When I wasn’t performing, I didn’t feel like I was succeeding as a person.
I didn’t really know how to be comfortable in my own skin. I could never just be unapologetically Kevin, walking into a room. I was never in the moment, alive. It was always the next thing, the next game, the next, next, next. It was like I was trying to achieve my way out of depression. And so I guess it’s not surprising that some of the darkest moments of my life happened when that crutch of basketball got taken away.
Much of the pain of work from people I talk to seems to stem from a disconnect between the “performer” and the person they really want to be.
#4 A crazy beautiful week 📷
An alpine lake in Colorado
Horeshoe bend (Page, AZ)
Camping in Zion National Park:
Hiking the narrows in Zion:
Sunset at Bryce National Park:
That’s all this week. See you next week and if you get a kick out of this and want to become a paid supporter or just share on your favorite social network, you can do that here: