The Nation:
The sharing economy is a nice way for rapacious capitalists to monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous, and to evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
Republicans think they have a
wedge issue that could separate Millennials from the Democratic Party: the rise of the so-called "sharing economy." Jeb Bush pointedly arrives at a campaign stop in an Uber car, emphasizing, along with younger rivals Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, his erstwhile "hipness" while lavishing praise on the technology-driven startups that have captured Americans' and Wall Street's fancy over the last few years.
Eager to court millennial voters and deep-pocketed tech executives, Republicans have almost universally praised smartphone apps that allow consumers to hire drivers, rent apartments and buy or sell just about any service online, latching onto them as prime examples of free-market entrepreneurship and workplace deregulation.
But in what is shaping up to be the first Uber election, Democrats have been more cautious, struggling to avoid appearing resistant to the popular new ventures while highlighting their potential negative effect on workers' pay and benefits.
Our own Jon Perr comprehensively addressed the GOP's love affair with the "secondhand economy" and the factors that led to it in a Rec-listed Diary
here.
Some "concerned" voices from the right have warned that the Democrats risk alienating Millennials if they oppose or criticize this new economic paradigm. Former prominent voices in the Obama Administration have also weighed in, gushing about the transformational effects of the "gig economy." David Plouffe, the President's former campaign director, now seamlessly transitioned in fine Washington fashion to Uber's "chief adviser" (aka: highly paid PR flak) criticized Hillary Clinton for her expressing concerns about the lack of any worker protections and benefits accompanying the explosion of "sharing" services and venture-capitalized companies like Uber, Airbnb, and hundreds of lesser-knowns. Dan Pfeiffer, former Deputy White House Communications director (and Plouffe's successor), has also contributed his wisdom, demonstrating a hitherto-unknown background in macroeconomic analysis:
"Progressive politicians are making a major error by positioning against the sharing economy," Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to President Obama, said in a tweet. "We need to be shaping the future, not opposing it."
It's hard to argue with such sincerely held sentiments. Clearly, no one wants to be in the untenable position of "opposing the future." Indeed, cemeteries are literally filled with people who have tried. But one of the more interesting things about the future, often overlooked, is that it hasn't happened yet. So it may be premature to capitulate to a business model that at its core degrades the protections historically afforded American workers to the point of non-existence in its effort to accommodate mercurial and shifting consumer preferences:
The sharing economy looks like a classically neoliberal response to neoliberalism: individualized and market-driven, it sees us all as micro-entrepreneurs fending for ourselves in a hostile world. Its publicists seek to transform the instability of the post–Great Recession economy into opportunity. Waiting for your script to sell? Drive an Uber on the weekend. Can’t afford a place to live while attending grad school? Take a two-bedroom apartment and rent one room out. You may lack health insurance, sick days and a pension plan, but you’re in control.
It's easy to understand why Republicans love this business model--it represents everything they stand for, with a dash of libertarianism and bohemian "hipness" thrown in for good measure. The tech-savvy draw and superficial "communal" sense exploited by such "sharing services" is a big key to its success, along with a veneer of modern "coolness" and of course, the omnipresent "convenience" factor, which the Republicans believe will shine brightly enough to blind Millennials and others to the fact that the "jobs" created by these ventures are often underpaying employees and lack benefits or workplace safety protections of any kind. The
Nation article linked above describes a philosophical evolution towards this kind of work, owing much to a Silicon valley mindset that tends to ascribe utopian qualities to every technological advancement, without thinking too much about their real-world consequences. The real danger, of course, is that we succumb to viewing the collateral effects of technological change as inevitable and irreversible.
But just because something is popular and convenient doesn't make it a good thing. There is really nothing new about the "sharing economy." It derives directly from the time-honored tradition of corporate CEO's squeezing every last drop of blood out of the American worker to make outsize profits and giving back little or nothing but the "privilege" of employment:
Just as the 19th century backlash against industrialization and worker exploitation led to many of the labor rights and safety protections enjoyed today, a similar movement is building in support of "gig" workers forced to scrape together a hodgepodge of jobs that barely pay the bills and lack security, pensions and other workplace benefits.
"This happened during the Gilded Age," said labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, comparing the vast wealth of the startups — 5-year-old Uber is now estimated to be valued at a stunning $50 billion — to that of the 19th century industrialists. "That creates the inequality we talk about."
Monica Potts, writing for the
Washington Monthly, describes how the emphasis on undercompensated, benefit-free jobs, while keeping people afloat, has had the perverse effect of flattening incomes as well as peoples' economic horizons, particularly for the Millennial generation whose futures were devastated by the Financial Crisis:
Maybe the twenty- and thirtysomethings of previous generations also felt this way when they looked up the age ladder. And Millennials do have some real potential advantages over previous generations, from our higher levels of education to all the possible benefits of digital technologies. But before we get too excited about all the low-cost goods and services our generation can summon with an app, we need to understand that even these features of the “sharing economy” are making some people above us very rich while we become a generation that owns virtually nothing.
Potts takes a hard look at all of the app-driven services that employ people on a sporadic, "contract" basis and asks whether anything has really changed except for the fact that they don't offer employees the benefits and protections that their old-fashioned predecessors did:
In reality, though, these are the same types of services that have always been around—private drivers and taxis, hotels, rental car companies—but their services are sliced up into tiny bits and provided by underpaid contingent workers, which is what we are ourselves. No one notices the money changing hands, and it may seem like we’re just sharing a service with friends. But in fact we’re enriching the owners of whatever app or platform we’re using, becoming just a data point on the path to their payday while we age without assets. It’s their world, and we’re just renting it.
Aging without assets--without adequate health care, without a pension, without even the most basic of workplace protections--that is where the "sharing economy" is taking us, while the same venture capitalists continue laughing all the way to the same banks that brought the economy to its knees only a few years ago. It's no wonder that the Republicans are all lining up to sing its praises--it offers a ready excuse to do nothing, maintaining stagnant wages and still profiting off the beleaguered American worker, trapped for life in a perpetual, revolving hamster-wheel of "gig" jobs with no benefits.
And there's really nothing "cool" or "hip" about that.