Victory against Uber won’t reverse the decline in labour rights

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/19/uber-court-case-labour-dispute

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Let us now give praise to Barbara Ann Berwick, a former Uber driver from California, who, it was revealed this week, has won a court case with – potentially – vast consequences. The California Labour Commissioner has ruled that, during her time last year working as a driver for the ride-hailing business, she had been an employee and not simply a contractor.

Related: Uber's business model under attack in California but drivers remain pessimistic

As contractors, Uber drivers supply the car, the fuel, the insurance, and their availability to pick up a passenger. They do not get any overtime, health insurance or sickness pay, or expenses towards the cost of carrying out their trade. It is a fantastic business model for the creators of the Uber app. But for the people actually doing the work? Not so much.

For now we should keep the prosecco on ice. Uber are appealing this ruling. In any case, it applies just to Berwick so far. Only if a series of similar cases and class actions are won will the massed ranks of precariously engaged contractors around the world be able to unite. Berwick has won a single legal battle, not the class war.

Nonetheless, the ruling represents a welcome break in the flow of news about worsening conditions for many workers. London Underground drivers have just voted overwhelmingly to take strike action after being told they will have to work night shifts for no extra pay. Some employees at the clothes retailer Next will lose £1,000 a year under new terms that have removed a £20 a week supplement for working a Sunday shift.

Employing people is a good and important thing to do. But if employers are benefiting from people’s labour then those people doing the work should be paid properly for it.

Last autumn Norman Pickavance, the former HR director of the supermarket chain Morrisons, conceded that some business leaders increasingly drew a distinction between “people who matter and people who don’t”. “People who matter are on the talent list,” he said at an HR conference. “People who don’t are in outsourced [low-skilled, low-paid] jobs. They are not seen as part of the organisation and can be treated differently.”

It is this attitude that the anthropologist David Graeber had in mind when he coined the term “bullshit jobs” in an essay two years ago. We used to speak, with a straight face, about “the dignity of labour”. It is not a very fashionable concept today. If both employer and employee know that the job being performed is worthless it is hard to keep up any pretence. “How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?” Graeber wrote.

We do not, perhaps, have to look too much further to find an answer to the “productivity riddle” of the UK economy: high levels of employment but with stubbornly disappointing levels of per capita output. Now it has been discovered that not only are some employers offering pretend jobs, others are commissioning pretend reviews of their services to appear online. Pretend employers, pretend jobs, pretend reviews: a bullshit economy.

Maybe the arrival of robots in the workplace to replace humans is just a more honest and up-to-date manifestation of what some employers have long wanted to see happen. Robots do not go on strike or threaten legal action. They do not ask for more money. They do not expect to be treated as an employee in any sense. This summer you could get a taste of the future yourself by staying at the Hotel Henn Na in Nagasaki, where the receptionists will all be remarkably lifelike robots. You can check in any time you like and the staff will never leave.

The threat of automation hangs over a growing proportion of the workforce. The sociologist Steve Fuller, professor at the University of Warwick, neatly deploys the language of business to ask, without irony: “What is the added value in being human?” This is what careers advice is going to sound like in the years to come.

The alternative to “adding value” is redundancy, or worse. “I put 34 years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance!”, Willy Loman tells his boss as he pleads for his job in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which is currently playing in London. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit!”

There are still good employers out there, and good jobs, for the lucky ones. We will all have to adapt. Technology mostly makes life better, and while some jobs are destroyed other new ones will be created. Not every boss believes that people simply “don’t matter”. Not every leader reacts to the complaints of a worried workforce with the words “fuck off and die!”

For now, though, let us enjoy this temporary victory for humans over technology awarded by the California Labour Commissioner. No app has been invented that can replace human decency. “People who drive people are employees,” the plucky Berwick told the New York Times this week. People who drive people are not the luckiest people in the world. Luckily for the rest of us Berwick has stood and fought her ground. Taxi for Uber!