The imminent (and complex) debate about the nature of work

Uber has just announced that it now has 20,000 drivers using its application in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes not just the city, but also San José and Oakland, along with several smaller urban and rural communities, making it one of the de facto largest generators of employment in the region, even though the car owners in question are not employees, but driver-partners, meaning that the company has no obligations regarding social security, overtime, holiday pay, or benefits of any kind.

The growth of these kinds of technology-based platforms and the so-called freelance economy is generating discussion between those who hail them as injecting liquidity and flexibility into the labor market and those who see them as a way to undermine the rights and benefits working people have struggled many years to achieve.

In many ways, this discussion comes down to a clash of beliefs between those widely held in the United States and those of the European Union, many of whose member states have traditionally offered their workforces better protection. Once Uber comes into the equation, positions become even more polarized. But beyond the “anything goes” position, or dismissing anybody who defends this gradual redefining of labor relations as a radical neoliberal, there are issues here that merit serious examination, given their potentially far-reaching consequences.

Some 34 percent of US workers describe themselves as freelance; that’s 53 million people ranging from those with regular jobs that do work on the side to boost their income, to those working part time. Over the course of the last decade, the numbers of people working for themselves has steadily increased. The development of technologies with the capacity to disrupt traditional labor relations is spreading, and has recently undergone a major advance thanks to the appearance of companies like Airbnb, Alibaba, Amazon and its Mechanical Turk, or of course, Uber. Much of the sharing economy is based on the so called “idle cycles”, down time, and on the use of resources that can only be converted into economic value only when the right technology and platforms come along.

I recently watched a very interesting video in The New Yorker called “Turking for a living”, about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which provides a glimpse of the economic future where large numbers of people are working online, engaged in repetitive and potentially alienating tasks in return for some cents per unit.

It seems to me that the question we need to address is not whether this disruptive economy is licit, appropriate, or desirable, but rather to establish that it’s already here and unlikely to go away any time soon, given that it generates employment and is part of many nations’ competitiveness. Similarly, the labor pool that feeds it is constantly growing as young people find fewer and fewer opportunities in traditional areas of employment and see in it the chance to earn some money as well as enjoying greater flexibility.

In the final analysis, the discussion comes down to whether it is legitimate to require part of the population to reject the possibility of job generation, which despite being highly precarious compared to the standards we have come to see as acceptable, can at the same time provide some income to those who have none, along with a degree of flexibility that for some is highly advantageous.

In other words, any balanced assessment cannot be based on weighing the issue up in terms of traditional employment versus a freelance economy with no social benefits, but should instead be seen as a dynamic, fluid situation where technology is constantly changing, where people are increasingly being replaced by machines, and where our idea of what constitutes work and its central role in life is also changing.

This is a much deeper discussion with more far-reaching consequences than it might at first appear, and one where it would appear both sociologists and economists have dramatically underestimated technology’s potential, for better or worse, depending on where you find yourself in the world and along life’s path.

(En español, aquí)