Tag: labour.

Photo by Ford Motor Company Canadian autoworkers have long been pace setters in the Canadian labour movement and as soon as its most recent agreement with General Motors was ratified, Unifor (the successor in 2013 after the merger of CAW and CEP) laid claim to that agreement’s ‘historic’ status. It

On January 13, 2015, around 70 of Portland’s 460 Taxi cabs protested fair taxi laws by parking in Pioneer square. Organizers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Photo by Aaron Parecki.

“Before the internet, renting a surfboard, a power tool or a parking
space from someone else was feasible, but was usually more trouble than it
was worth,” noted The Economist in a 2013 story about the rise of the socalled
Sharing Economy. But not so any longer, the piece continues, noting
that the sudden and widespread availability of online platforms that link
“peers” to one another has made any such trouble disappear, unleashing
undreamed of convenience and a new galaxy of consumer options. Today, it
seems like this interpretation of the Sharing Economy is everywhere, as
journalists, pundits and politicians have lined up to praise its “innovative”
promise. Yet is there something more sinister lurking behind the communitarian
facade that so often accompanies descriptions of the peer-to-peer
online sector? To consider this question, we connected with Tom Slee, author
of the new book What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy.

David Hugill: Let me begin with a basic question. What is the
Sharing Economy?

Tom Slee: It’s a new wave of Internet platforms that are
designed to facilitate exchanges between individuals.
Early on, it involved things things like tool-sharing
programs. Why does everybody need to have a
hand drill? You never really use it. It just sits there
on the shelf. Why not share it with others? The Sharing
Economy came about as a means of using Internet
platforms to solve problems like this one, initially
with a lot of egalitarian talk, a lot of community
focused talk. The idea was that the Internet
could facilitate person-to-person exchanges without
having to go through the big corporations. Today, it
is primarily a way of using Internet platforms to
facilitate transactions in the service economy, for
example by connecting people with car rides,
through Uber or Lyft, with places to stay, through
AirBnB, with personal loans, through Lending Club,
with places to work, through WeWork, and all those
kinds of things. As the money in the Sharing Economy
has grown, so has the driving ideology behind
it, and now it’s become basically a deregulation
movement, with companies like Uber and Airbnb
building business models that demand deregulation
of their industries in cities around the world.

DH: So you are dubious about the claim that these enterprises
are mostly about progressive forms of community
building. In fact, you’ve written quite critically
about the way in which proponents of the Sharing
Economy have adopted — even co-opted — the
communitarian language of social movements to
describe their work. Can you elaborate?

TS: I think co-opt is the right word. In fact, the only hesitancy
I have about using that word is that I think
some proponents of the Sharing Economy literally
believe the things they are saying. In many ways, this
is a product of what has been called the California
Ideology, which is a strange combination of beliefs
that have traditionally been both left and right wing,
a kind of anti-authoritarianism that has become a
full fledged techno-libertarianism. There is this
belief that there is no contradiction between having
sustainable, small scale exchanges and globe-straddling
corporations that will administer them. If there
is one thing that motivated me to do this work,
it is seeing progressive language used to promote
something completely antithetical. Sharing Economy
boosters use the language of non-commercial
exchange, but what’s mostly happening is that they
are promoting the extension of a harsh free-market
economics into places that it previously couldn’t
reach. So co-opt is absolutely the right word.

DH: *In your book, you hint at the way that Sharing Economy
corporations — especially Uber and AirBnB —
use the language of “livable” cities to describe the
implications of the services they provide. Rhetorically
at least, their ideas harken back to Jane Jacobs
and other liberal urbanists that valued lively, populated,
salubrious and co-operative urban spaces. I
get the sense that you share my incredulity about
their claims. Is that right?

TS: I think AirBnB has been the been the biggest in
terms of this. They’ve talked about the “shareable
city,” or, the “open city,” where you can find a home
wherever you go and so on. They celebrate the small
scale, individuals having people stay in their houses
and maybe fixing bikes on the side or something. In
this way, they promote a kind of Jacobsian vision of
the city, if you like. I just don’t know if the AirBnB
folks believe their own messages anymore. If they
do, they must be isolated. In the last few weeks, I
have been working with a journalist who writes for
Fusion and is doing some research on AirBnB’s
impact in Reykjavik. Here you have a city of a
120,000 people and a total of 22 apartments available
for long term rent. Essentially none, in other
words. At the same time, two-and-a-half thousand
apartments have been turned over to AirBnB listings.
So AirBnB might say “come and live like a
local,” but actual locals can’t even live like locals
anymore.

I think AirBnB has been the been the biggest in
terms of this. They’ve talked about the “shareable
city,” or, the “open city,” where you can find a home
wherever you go and so on. They celebrate the small
scale, individuals having people stay in their houses
and maybe fixing bikes on the side or something. In
this way, they promote a kind of Jacobsian vision of
the city, if you like. I just don’t know if the AirBnB
folks believe their own messages anymore. If they
do, they must be isolated. In the last few weeks, I
have been working with a journalist who writes for
Fusion and is doing some research on AirBnB’s
impact in Reykjavik. Here you have a city of a
120,000 people and a total of 22 apartments available
for long term rent. Essentially none, in other
words. At the same time, two-and-a-half thousand
apartments have been turned over to AirBnB listings.
So AirBnB might say “come and live like a
local,” but actual locals can’t even live like locals
anymore.

AirBnB is very effective at promoting their narrative.
They regularly put out these studies on the
benefits that their service provides to the cities
where they operate. They say “we bring a lot of
money to this city.” They compare the full number of
AirBnB bookings to what it would be like if all those
people had decided to stay at home and they say
“look, here’s all the money we’ve brought in.” Then
they take the power consumption of people staying
in hotels and compare it to people staying in AirBnbs
and say “see, we saved you all this energy.” But you
could also do it the other way around. You could say,
look, “we took all this money away because people
weren’t staying in hotels.” Or “we added environmental
problems” if you compare their impact to
what it would have been if people had stayed at
home. That’s why I say that if, they still believe their
own rhetoric at this point, I have no idea how they
square the circle.

DH: I don’t know if you’ve had the misfortune of reading
Zipcar founder Robin Chase’s book, *Peers Inc.,
which is a Sharing Economy manifesto of sorts. In
any case, it really pushes this idea that Sharing
Economy enterprises are topplers of entrenched
power, that they are the builders of horizontal networks
that supersede and overwhelm centralized
forms of power. There may be an element of truth in
this, but what interests me is how hard it is to square
this claim to decentralization with the new forms of
stratification that these businesses have created. I
mean how can a “movement” that has created so
many new billionaires be about anti-hierarchical
decentralization? Isn’t there a perverse irony at the
core of these claims?*

TS: It is remarkable, isn’t it? You have the image of the
network as very decentralized, but the end result
has been that the internet in many of its manifestations
is a winner-take-all environment. The Sharing
Economy has become an environment where the biggest
players are as big as ever and to some extent
you have a long tail of people making a few bucks.
What we have is what some political scientists have
called the “missing middle.” I don’t think AirBnB is a
threat to Marriott or other big hotel chains. It is a
threat to bed-and-breakfasts and small independent
hotels. What we’ve seen is that these new platforms
don’t end up challenging the biggest companies but
independent operators who get stuck in the middle
and have a hard time making it.

DH: So is this claim that Internet platforms are providing
new opportunities for people to connect in a decentralized
way simply a ruse, or are there Internet
innovations that are capable of providing genuinely
progressive opportunities to move beyond concentrated
forms of corporate power?

TS: You can go back to the ’90s and you’ll find that a lot
of the early Internet culture movements — Indymedia,
things like that — were very big on the potential
of disintermediated communication forms to remove
hierarchies, get rid of gatekeepers in publishing and
so on. But my feeling is that they got completely outflanked
by the big platforms. You don’t have to
worry about publishers stopping you from getting
your message out, but you do have to deal with
Amazon. There are still groups of people who still
very firmly believe that the Internet has some inherent
counter-cultural value to it, but I see that as a
moment in time that has come and gone.

DH: It does seem like the counter-cultural possibilities of
the Internet are less abundant than they were even a
few years ago. Are there particular technological
shifts that have accelerated the corporatization of
the online world?

TS: I think there are a couple of things. One is the rise of
cloud computing and the platforms built upon it. We
don’t have networked architectures any longer.
Instead, everything is going through the same set of
servers. Yes, you might have a network of friends on
Facebook, but all that information is on Facebook’s
servers. So we’ve seen that kind of evolution of
different platforms. I also think that the rise of mobile
technology — including apps — has created a much
more segregated experience. It takes away what
Jonathan Zittrain calls the “generative” nature of
the technology. The phone is essentially, if not
purely, a consumption device. It’s not a device you
can do stuff with; it’s not a general purpose computer
in the same way.

In addition to those two changes, I think that, by
2006 or 2007, a lot of people who could no longer
get jobs on Wall Street were coming across to Silicon
Valley instead. I think that changed the culture as
well. There was a time when banks could offer the
smartest computer science and math students a big
bag of money to come and work on ever more complex
financial instruments, but as the 2008 crash
approached and then happened, that opportunity
went away. Now it’s the Silicon Valley giants and
the startups called “unicorns” (companies with over
$1B in venture capital) that can offer the biggest
bags of money. And money, as they say, changes
everything.

DH: One of the things that’s really interesting in your
book is the way you challenge the idea the Sharing
Economy is mostly about giving people a little extra
money on the side. a describes itself as a platform
that allows people to make a supplementary income,
maybe to pay for the cost of playing golf or some
other activity. AirBnB describes itself as a platform
that allows people to offset the cost of urban living
by renting out part of their space. But your research
suggests we should be wary about taking these
clams at face value.

TS: For AirBnB, this kind of arrangement might represent
half their business, but the other half is business
people running multiple properties, doing it on
a professional basis. I know somebody that went to
one of these AirBnB events in Paris where they get
all the hosts together. These events are all about
training hosts to make more money. How do you do
that? How do you professionalize? Maybe you get a
cleaning service. Maybe you get a key handling service.
They are going down that route of professionalization
very quickly. Uber is an interesting case
because they kind of came at it sideways. Two years
ago, Uber was not talking about people working for
four hours a week. They were saying you can make
$90,000 driving for Uber. People were talking about
the end of the poorly paid taxi driver. But that vision
turned out to be a mirage. Now they are saying, “we
don’t have to worry about things like decent pay
because it is just a bit of extra money.” I think
they’ve found that that is more effective public message.
You know, don’t worry, it’s not a real job.

DH: There is a way in which champions of the Sharing
Economy — whether they are actual Silicon Valley
leaders or simply the provincial lieutenants tapped
to do their bidding — describe the transformations
that they promote as inevitable. They tell policy
makers and others that the types of exchanges
associated with their platforms are here for good
and that policy makers better adapt to the new reality
or risk being reduced to backwater status. Do you
see this sense of personal destiny as part of the California
Ideology that you described earlier?

TS: Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was very involved in the
design of their new logo, which represents the coming
together of bits and atoms. The merging of physical
and digital worlds. Could you paint yourself in
bigger, more spectacular colours? No. For them, it’s
very useful to conflate the march of technology with
the march of their businesses. But while technology
does advance, individual businesses can come and
go very quickly. A few years ago Groupon was the
future of shopping. And then, boom! What’s Groupon?
I think governments run the risk of closing
down future innovations by being too friendly to the
first big kid on the block.

DH: So we have these platforms that describe themselves
as revolutionary, transformative, etc., and
there is certainly a lot of truth to that. But insofar as
they are pursuing a relatively straightforward
deregulatory agenda, are they not, in many ways,
simply recapitulating a well-established form of
right wing politics?

TS: Sure, I think they are. I think it comes from a peculiarly
American worldview as well. I don’t think you
would have seen the same kind of development if
things had started elsewhere. There is a Sharing
Economy conference in Paris called OUIshare which
happens every year and it has been through a few
crises of conscience over this because it wasn’t the
original vision that they started with. To generalize,
I think we can say that Americans are more likely to
see the government as a thing to be got out of the
way. They simply don’t see it as having a useful role.
Whereas, I think most of the Left elsewhere has a
much more complex relationship with government. I
mean, of course there is the Snowden revelations,
there is a lot of surveillance stuff, and there are a lot
of coercive problems with the state. But at the same
time the state can be a bulwark against the ravages
of free market capitalism, so we have a more tortured
relationship with it, I think. Most defenders of
the Sharing Economy don’t seem to be at all troubled
by internal conflict on these questions.

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

Subscribe today and receive every issue of Canadian Dimension hot off the press.

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Photo by Darren Stone, Victoria Times Colonist

In recent years, much has been made about the experience of millennials in the contemporary economy. And this isn’t without reason: wages are low, education is expensive, housing is inaccessible and finding secure employment is increasingly difficult. There does need to be a discussion in our society about intergenerational inequality, including within labour unions and left movements.

But the “Generation Screwed” (GS) movement — which suggests that the main driver of youth inequality is based on tax-and-spend governments — is anathema to justice between and within generations.

Generation Screwed’s right-twist spin

In simple terms, the GS campaign is an outgrowth of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which acts in routine opposition to public sector workers and government programs. Further, the GS campaign’s research comes overwhelmingly from right and right-leaning sources like the Fraser Institute, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, the Vancouver Sun, and the National Post. None of these sources represent youth and student movements, none represent the positions of labour or professional organizations, and none cover a part the political spectrum left of the Liberal Party.

And while it’s perfectly valid for conservatives to speak about generational issues, the GS campaign has to be more expressly understood as one that represents a certain path, and not a general panacea, for young workers’ futures.

The demonization of public spending

The GS campaign — much like the CTF more broadly — focuses on how public debt loads are bad for taxpayers. To outline this, the GS campaign is visiting campuses across Ontario and Quebec with a giant ticking debt clock. The implication here is that young Canadians are being saddled with deep debts due to years of spendthrift governments headed up by the Boomers.

My concern isn’t the focus on debt as much as it is the strong implication that the issue is largely one of spending. As one of their videos puts it: “governments have been spending too much money for decades, and our generation is going to be left with the bill.” Ultimately, it is suggested that young people must work to stop “the spending problem, and stop the debt problem that it causes.”

There is no consideration that much of our programs are underfunded, due in part to a Boomer generation which has voted large tax cuts for itself, certainly more than it has created new and innovative social programs.

In this sense, the debt is an issue of importance, but the solution is to ensure proper levels of taxation — which might very well mean raising taxes on all but Canada’s poorest — to ensure program stability and adequate debt levels.

Simply, the GS movement misses a great opportunity to attack older Canadians who voted for irresponsible economic revenue slashers like Stephen Harper’s two-per cent GST cut, and to some degree the Tax Free Savings Account Program.

Turning Keynes in his head

Here, the argument from GS — as per its Executive Director Aaron Gunn — is that social spending can become unsustainable in periods of high indebtedness, and that money going to finance the debt could be spent on programs like education. But again, the focus is less on the reluctance to adequately tax the populace, and instead on governments “making expensive promises” and “living beyond their means.”

Again, the talk is about excessive pensions and social spending, which takes the form of “unfunded liabilities” that will be levied on the next generation of Canadian workers and retirees. And while there is cause to be concerned about the funding of certain pension schemes and social programs, the issues has been more a combination of tax cuts and a failure to invest in those programs. A big factor has been the downloading of responsibilities from federal to provincial governments, and from the provinces to the municipalities.

As I note above, the GS position is one that is tenable as a general conservative take for smaller government, increased precarity, and rising inequality. But it isn’t the path forward for the majority of young workers.

The alternative path

In my view, the path forward for young workers should be based on a three-pronged movement. First, I actually agree with the GS campaign that high debt levels can be a millstone on the public purse. Socialists like Tommy Douglas have thought no different, arguing that a government indebted to private financiers becomes subordinate to them. But again, the solution here isn’t that we spend too much, but that we tax too little. Savings — I’m sure — can be found, but there is still a great deal more the state can do to provide a decent life and equal opportunity for every young Canadian.

Additionally, my fear is that the GS campaign for intergenerational equality is masking a general attack on social equity within generations. We have to remember that as much as the Boomer generation has benefited from the post-war compromise, and as much as the “old economy Steven” meme speaks to the frustrations of young workers, many older Canadians have direct experiences with poverty, precarity, and a lack of opportunity. Their generation, on aggregate, is a privileged one, but we can’t universalize their experiences.

But I still agree that there needs to be greater onus placed on older Canadians for creating an environment of rising debt, lower taxes, and a declining quality of work. Much of this rests at the feet of employers and Liberal and Conservative governments, but even older leadership on the left has failed to adequately include young workers within decision-making systems, and has gradually conceded pension equality by accepting two-tier models.

Some of Canada’s biggest unions have to reckon with the fact that, under their leadership, we have increasingly accepted the validity of unequal pay for equal work, as long as those being treated unequally are young Canadians. But the story isn’t all gloom and doom, as some unions like CUPW took a stand for young workers to defend pension equality.

Nevertheless, we need to ensure that labour and left movements look out for young people and their interests, because if they don’t, the “generation screwed” narrative will be marshalled as a force against the very things the left has achieved over the past century and more. And they will win.

Christo Aivalis, a member of the CD web committee, is an adjunct professor of history at Queen’s University. His dissertation examined Pierre Trudeau’s relationship with organized labour and the CCF-NDP, and has been accepted for publication with UBC Press. His work has appeared in the Canadian Historical Review, Labour/le Travail, Our Times Magazine, Ricochet and Rankandfile.ca. He has also served as a contributor to the Canadian Press, Toronto Star, CTV and CBC. His current project is a biography of Canadian labour leader A.R. Mosher.

Giant banner in
Geneva Switzerland
by campaigners
for a universal basic
income, May 14,
2016. Photo by
Fabrice Coffrini/
AFP; posted on
cyprusnews.eu.

With the two largest Canadian provinces vowing
to take a hard look at some form of basic income
program and the federal minister for Families saying
the idea merits debate, Canada has been making
headlines alongside Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands
and Kenya as a possible pioneer in the realworld
exploration of guaranteed income.

There’s little chance Canada will be first to the
plate, however. Very little is known about Ontario’s
plans beyond a short paragraph in the Liberal government
budget speech promising to announce a
pilot project this fall. And although the Québec minister
responsible for developing his own province’s
plans has literally written the book on the subject
— François Blais’s 2002 Ending Poverty: A Basic
Income for All Canadians — Blais has also made it
clear that he favours a go-slow, étapiste approach
that could take as much as 20 to 25 years to achieve
a full BI program.

While media attention in the global North has
focused on the (recently defeated) Swiss referendum,
some of the most interesting BI projects and
plans are in the global South, from Brazil to South
Africa. And not all are government initiatives. The
GiveDirectly.org charity is planning on distributing a
BI to 6,000 Kenyan villagers over 10 years in a historic
program expected to cost $30 million. (They
estimate the same project in the global North would
cost $1 billion.) By targeting a population that
already has an extremely low income, GiveDirectly
can affordably conduct what will likely be the world’s
first true study of a long-term, universal guaranteed
income program that provides for a basic standard of
living, including the potential for investments, such
as livestock, that can further increase recipients’
incomes.

Back at home, Ontario Finance Minister Charles
Sousa announced the province’s vague intentions in
his February budget speech. “The pilot project will
test a growing view at home and abroad that a basic
income could build on the success of minimum wage
policies and increases in child benefits by providing
more consistent and predictable support in the context
of today’s dynamic labour market. The pilot
would also test whether a basic income would provide
a more efficient way of delivering income support,
strengthen the attachment to the labour force,
and achieve savings in other areas, such as health
care and housing supports. The government will
work with communities, researchers and other stakeholders
in 2016 to determine how best to design and
implement a Basic Income pilot.”

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne told CBC Radio
in March that the proposal arose out of “a real concern
around the way social assistance works in
Ontario. What we want people to do is build up
capacity in their lives so they can be successful.”
Wynne said just coming up with the plan will take a
year, however, with a program budget only in 2017.

The pilot project is expected to target a specific
community or communities rather than across the
province as a whole.

Mixed messages in Québec

Québec, on the other hand, could be looking at a
gradual implementation of a universal but watereddown
BI program, if Blais’s book and recent statements
to media are any indication. The former dean
of Université Laval’s Social Science faculty, Blais’s
slim 101-page treatise is a mostly dry examination of
the case for instituting a basic income. Although he
expresses strong support for BI, the political scientist
wrote that “the main challenge is substituting it
as gently as possible” for the current mishmash of
direct and indirect government support programs
and tax credits.

Blais the politician, however, has been part of a
government hell-bent on implementing a policy of
austerity despite evidence from around the globe
that such polices have actually harmed the neoliberal
economies where they have been implemented.
And as minister for Employment and Social Solidarity,
he has been advocating a form of conditionality
that Blais the academic condemned. (The Québec
government has introduced legislation aimed at
forcing young, first-time welfare recipients to enrol
in training programs or face cuts of up to half of their
monthly allocation — the type of situation Blais
described 15 years earlier something that “will only
result in further poverty and exclusion.”)

Blais has acknowledged that BI would be a hard
sell. In his book he advocates a level of aid that is
“as high as possible,” but mitigates that with concern
that a transition that moves too fast or too far
may frighten off public support. In recent interviews,
he suggested that initial reforms should be revenue
neutral, a far cry from the way he described BI a few
months earlier as “the most radical idea of the last
50 years.”

As an academic, Blais was adamant that any program
be universal, individualized and unconditional
— with cheques going to each citizen, rich and poor
alike — in order to simplify administration, increase
transparency, and eliminate any means-testing associated
with receiving government support. “Selective
programs are generally stigmatizing and humiliating
for the people that are eligible,” he wrote. “They are
forced into the situation of petitioners who must
show proof of their poverty and put up with constant
investigations into their personal life.”

But as Stéphan Corriveau, director-general of a
Québec federation of non-profit housing groups, told
The Globe and Mail in February, a flawed BI model
would hurt rather than help the poor. “The devil’s in
the details. A guaranteed national income is both a
very promising and threatening (possibility). It could
be threatening because some of the proposals that
are on the table are actually going to diminish the
income of the lower-income part of the population
and are being used as a way of dismantling the
social security net.”

Ottawa “welcomes debate”

In Ottawa, the current Minister of Families, Children
and Social Development is Blais’ friend and former
Université Laval colleague, economist Jean-Yves
Duclos. Duclos has also studied and written extensively
about income equity issues, including a paper
with Blais. In a research paper he co-wrote in 2013,
however, Duclos concluded that wage subsidies
would be a more effective way to help pull the unemployed
out of poverty than an unconditional income
transfer, which his models suggested might actually
increase poverty. Interviewed by The Globe and Mail
after his appointment to the Justin Trudeau cabinet,
Duclos said that while BI wasn’t a government priority,
he welcomed the debate. “There are many different
types of guaranteed minimum income. There are
many different versions. I’m personally pleased that
people are interested in the idea.”

The Liberal Party itself has not endorsed a specific
BI program, but a resolution adopted by party
delegates in May calls on Liberal officials, “in consultation
with the provinces, (to) develop a poverty
reduction strategy aimed at providing a minimum
guaranteed income.”

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

Subscribe today and receive every issue of Canadian Dimension hot off the press.

Buy this issue or subscribe.