Smartphones and apps have created a gig-economy world. And a new California law could reshape that into a different world with a groundbreaking shift in defining who’s a contract worker and whose duties make him or her an actual employee, with the company responsible for healthcare, payroll taxes and the like. Supporters of the law — like Assembly Speaker Anthony Renden , who called the gig economy “[bleeping] feudalism” — argue that people who work like employees deserve employees’ benefits.
And then, unfortunately, the third leg of the stool of value creation and Big Tech seems to be around exploitation. Several years ago, we as a populace were outraged by the notion that certain fast food organizations put in place software that automatically clocked out minimum wage employees when the restaurant was not busy.
Now, there will be unintended consequences. And that is the gig economy contractors are prevalent across all types of industries. There’ll be some gymnastics that firms have to go through to comply with the law. So this recognition that unskilled laborers have not kept pace with the rest of the economy is overdue.There are already lawsuits against this. There are already arguments that this is killing the golden goose that, look, the Industrial Revolution was also disruptive. Families no longer worked as families at home. The father, the mother went out to work. And this is the same thing.
The data about our online habits and practices are cumulatively worth billions to tech companies, and now a new California law gives us more control over that data, if we exercise it to push back against Big TechThe concern I would have around the legislation is that it prohibits or creates liability around the sale of data, not necessarily the abuse of data.
And I think young people who are able to create what feels almost like magic-like technology have filled that void. As a result, they are not subject to the same scrutiny the typical businesses are. So these companies are not only more capable of handling this type of legislation or regulation — they have avoided it. They are playing by a different set of standards and rules.Is it their lack of technological expertise that keeps anything from being done? Because one hundred some years ago we broke up monopolies and went after the trusts. We had progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, like California Gov. Hiram Johnson.
They allocate tremendous resources to put that company out of business, and if they fail to perform infanticide on the new company, the fledgling competitor, they buy it.
opinion Great interview