The man for our times

Someday it will all make sense to historians.  There really isn't any person more perfectly suited to have been President during this golden age of grifting.

As Trump is the apotheosis of rank materialism and revanchist nationalism in the political arena, Uber is Silicon Valley’s greatest and most absurd offering to the American public, filling a need we never knew we had with a business model that is nothing short of fantasy. Uber’s power lies in the promise it proffers to multibillion-dollar venture capital firms, a carnival bark that translates into making the unsustainable somehow sustainable. Deeply discounted car rides can turn a profit someday, somehow, because people will like them enough. Make us bigger so we can grow. We won’t let you down because this time is different. This is the nature of capitalism on Uber: the dream doesn’t end when you wake up.

For most of its existence, politicians—Democratic and Republican alike—celebrated Uber’s expansion. To resist such a company was to be perceived as a luddite, against tech and progress and what makes this an allegedly great nation. Jeb Bush, when he was briefly a presidential front-runner, turned Uber into a campaign prop, and Democrats in cities across America welcomed what they believed to be any politician’s fetish object: a thing that makes jobs. Uber had jobs, lots of them, never mind the pay. There wasn’t much critical thinking about the economics and morality of ride-hail apps at this juncture. Coincidentally or not, this was before 2016. Times were simpler. Reality TV hosts could run for president, but they couldn’t win.

Stupid mayor is stupid

In this cautionary tale, Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto slowly realizes he's made a huge mistake by giving Uber everything it wants from in return for nothing besides a momentary claim to being an "Innovation!" guy.  Here's a timeline with emails and stuff, My favorite part is probably where Peduto goes on the radio and lectures his critics as though they are children.

The emails I obtained showed that Peduto was both eager to impress the Silicon Valley hotshot and was happy to carry the company's water in public. In May 2015, Peduto and his staff fought hard both in public and behind the scenes to get the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to reduce a fine levied against the company for operating in the state without permission. After we published our story, Peduto railed against us on local radio.

"I have an opportunity to talk to the CEO of Uber on a semi-regular basis. And they're committed to creating over a thousand jobs in this city that are well-paying jobs," Peduto told Pittsburgh radio station WDVE after our story ran. "To say 'Oh my god, he's trying to help this horrible company, he's defending this horrible company. When we are creating an entire industry that brought the White House here to talk about autonomous vehicles, robotics, and everything else and will bring other companies and spinoffs for decades to come … it's unbelievably ridiculous."

Uber goes on to deliver none of the jobs, data sharing or any of the obligations of the "partnership" Peduto imagined they had agreed to because, of course. He seems frustrated about this now but then maybe next time he'll remember that when you're getting to be text buds with a billionaire venture capital creep, you're probably doing the opposite of serving your constituents well.

The takeaway here for politicians is that Uber—nor any other major corporation—is not your friend. The company has shown time and time again that it will ignore regulations, lobby ferociously, promise the moon and stars, and then act as it always has: in whatever manner is best for Uber. Uber has always done this; it's long past time for local politicians to stop handing the keys to their cities to the company.

Or any company, really.  Will your local politicians to learn this lesson, though. Not unless there's a slideshow about it at the next Entrepreneur Week.

We are living in Robocop

Hard to think of a more perfect allegory of late capitalist dystopia than Uber driver shoots carjacker.  Maybe if it was a self-driving car Uber somehow connected to Sidney Torres's app. But this is close enough.

Every public good must be commoditized

It's the only way a third party tech giant can squeeze some profit out of the services you thought we paid for with public funds.

Sidewalk also wants to redefine public transport. Flow Transit would integrate information and payment for almost every form of transport into Google Maps. Choose a destination and the app will estimate a journey price and duration using everything from buses and taxis to Uber, Lyft, car-share services like Zipcar and even bike-shares.

“This idea makes sense in general,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT. “It is important however, that such a platform be open to multiple players.” While Sidewalk did not rule out other partners, its documents focused on Google apps. One said, “During the demo period, the [city’s] data platform includes… data exchange with one party - starting with Google.”

For the demo, Sidewalk wants 90,000 low-income transit users, who might currently be given discounted or free bus passes, to be able to spend those subsidies on ride-share services instead.

Pozdnoukhnov worries that this would threaten traditional bus services: “The problem is that this money will end up with Uber rather than the transit agencies, undermining their existence. The only public systems that will survive will be light rail and subways.”

Columbus would receive 1% of the revenue from the app, earning about $2.25m annually according to Sidewalk. Sidewalk did not disclose its cut. Google owns about 5% of Uber.

Why does labor still support Democrats?

AFL-CIO released a statement this week on the so-called "gig economy" and the model by which companies reclassify employees as independent contractors in order to avoid having to meet NLRA requirements.

Making the right policy choices begins with ensuring people who work for on-demand companies enjoy the rights and protections of employees. Under current law, only workers who are defined as “employees” are protected by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and enjoy minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and family and medical leave. Generally speaking, most protections against discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, age, disability and national origin are available only to employees and job applicants.

Encouraging on-demand companies to rely on a workforce of independent contractors who lack the rights and protections of employees is bad public policy, yet four states have passed legislation doing just that for Uber and Lyft drivers. Similar bills are pending in five other states.

It's all well and good to voice objections to the political maneuverings of companies like Uber and its lobbyists. But you're only telling half the story if you don't name names. 

The presidency of Barack Obama has catapulted a network of former advisers into lucrative positions.

Members of the president’s brain trust have steadily moved outside the administration in recent years, capitalizing on their association with the Obama brand to launch careers as advisers, consultants and hired guns. 

“You see people not only serving as representatives of a lobbying firm but taking these very high-profile corporate jobs. I think that is becoming more common,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University. “Businesses understand that this is a great opportunity for them.”

David Plouffe, the mastermind behind the president’s two campaigns, became the latest Obama insider to make a move this week by taking a job with Uber, the up-and-coming ride-sharing app that is battling local governments and taxicab companies over its business model.

Plouffe’s task at the ride-sharing company — now estimated to be worth around $17 billion — is familiar: finding a way to woo the public and win on the political battlefield.

“We needed someone who understood politics but who also had the strategic horsepower to reinvent how a campaign should be run,” said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

As the AFL-CIO statement notes, Plouffe has made significant progress with state legislatures since signing on with Uber.  Maybe it's time to stop supporting the Democratic party if all it does is act as a farm system for these people. 

I don't think that word means what you think it means

Here is a transcript of some remarks made by the President today at something called a White House Summit on Worker Voice.  Let me just point out something that indicates just how clueless, hypocritical, and/or condescending Obama and most mainstream Democrats really are toward, not only the labor movement, but just most working people in general. 

Toward the end of the President's speech he appears to express some sympathy toward the problem of increasing underemployment.

Oftentimes companies became more sophisticated about keeping out unions.  Workers, fearing that they might lose their job to off-shoring or to moving down to a right-to-work state, felt less confident about negotiations.

Our culture as a whole started somehow extolling greed is good, instead of, how do we work together to create a good society for everybody.  Jobs, as a consequence, began paying less, offering fewer benefits.  And in recent years, we’ve seen more companies cut costs by hiring contractors and “permatemps”  -- workers who are laboring side-by-side with full-time employees but don’t earn the same pay and benefits and job security.  That’s a bad phrase -- permatemps.    

"That's a bad phrase -- permatemps."  But does the President even know what it means?  He himself uses the word moments after having praised the very "sophisticated companies" responsible for facilitating its spread. 

In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of American innovation in the workforce.  And because of technology, people are empowered and employers are empowered to create value and services in new ways.

We’ve got folks who are getting a paycheck driving for Uber or Lyft; people who are cleaning other people’s houses through Handy; offering their skills on TaskRabbit.  And so there’s flexibility and autonomy and opportunity for workers.  And millennials love working their phones much quicker than I can.  (Laughter.)  And all this is promising.  But if the combination of globalization and automation undermines the capacity of the ordinary worker and the ordinary family to be able to support themselves, if employers are able to use these factors to weaken workers’ voices and give them a take-it-or-leave-it deal in which they don't have a chance to ever save for the kind of retirement they're looking for, if we don't refashion the social compact so that workers are able to be rewarded properly for the labor that they put in -- people like Terrence -- then we're going to have problems.

LOL those millennials! They are so good and quick with that crazy phone-fu, amiright? Is that kind of banality all it takes for a whole room to miss that the President just got finished praising the "innovators" making everyone into permatemps?  We really are doomed. 

Note also the segue into the threat of "globalization and automation" he just helped bolster via the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.  It's hard to think of any way a Democrat could be any more shameless.

Oh wait. Here's one. Just today Hillary Clinton told PBS she is now opposed to TPP. Hillary Clinton, you might recall, used to be Obama's Secretary of State where she almost certainly had a hand in crafting the negotiations that led to the deal.  Don't worry. She'll come back around as soon as she doesn't have to face Democratic primary voters anymore.

Perpetual underemployment

Pretty comprehensive post here on the so-called "sharing" or "gig" economy.... you know, Taskrabbit, Uber, Airbnb and the like.

One problem we run up against when discussing these phenomena locally, is our reportage tends to assume the debate happening over Airbnb in New Orleans is occurring in total isolation. It's almost as though Bob Ellis and some "entrepreneurial" landlord friends of his invented the thing.  Readers are left to interpret the issue, as Stacy Head does, as a simply a local means of putting property to what realtors call its "highest use" purpose in order to "reduce blight" and (hopefully) raise tax revenue (though I don't think that's as much a priority as they say.) 

The only counter-argument presented is the upward pressure this action is putting on rents.  That ought to be enough but.. as we've seen.. our political leaders don't really care about renters or poor people in general.  And by and large the press writes about gentrification as though it were a natural inevitable event.  I try to write about the deliberate policy choices our leaders make in order to encourage and nurture it but that never seems to get through to anybody.

Of course, they say all politics is local, so it's important to "act locally"... as they also say. But it's also worth keeping in mind, at least for perspective's sake, that the context for this thing we're acting on is global.

Worse yet, the model itself caters to the worst aspects of neo-libertarianism (no rules, no regulations, no oversight, no workplace protections, no safety nets, and so on). It’s as cynical and even a little desperate. It can even be predatory and opportunistic… which would be somewhat fine if the prize were worth the cost to the community, but the reward is basically worth pennies on the dollar, which makes it a zero-sum game for everyone not standing to make real money on the back end. It undermines full-time employment. It undermines workplace protections. It undermines income security. Follow that daisy chain long enough and you’ll see how it impacts consumer confidence and spending too. And does it at least lower the cost of goods or increase real GDP? Nope. It doesn’t.

Here’s the truth of this model: look at it long enough and you’ll start to see how Dickensian it really is. And once you see it, once you get what it really is and where it really leads, you can’t unsee it. For more on that, read this bit by Alexander Howard (Huffpo’s Senior Tech and Society Editor).

Here’s an exercise: Imagine a world where nobody has full time jobs anymore, where everyone is a contractor. For some of you, that will probably seem like some kind of entrepreneurial utopia, a libertarian dream. In theory, sure. It sounds kind of cool because “freedom”… but then you realize that it’s the kind of model that we did away with in the early parts of the 20th century, and for good reasons: A “gig economy” cannot produce or support a healthy middle class. It doesn’t factor-in realistic retirement planning or college savings. Because it eliminates income security, it all but eradicates upward mobility. What you end up with is a 1% class (more like a 5%) and a 99% (95%) class, which isn’t super healthy for any economy, as history shows us time and time again. Fully realized, that gig economy looks like this for the 99%: selling and renting everything they possibly can to make ends meet and save a little money here and there. For the 1%, it cuts most of the cost out of running a business, which is kind of the point.

Not all of that applies to Airbnb specifically. But the Short Term Rental "sharing economy" idealized as locals residents renting out a couch or a spare bedroom on the weekends,  is often sold to us locally as a way to help service industry workers or "culture bearers" as they're sometimes infuriatingly termed, make ends meet.  Why are we not focused on helping these people make ends meet through their regular work?   Our thought leaders won't say.  Although it's likely that tourism leaders are pleased with a labor market driven by perpetual underemployment as it is. And since tourism leaders are the thought leaders in this town, well.. there you go.

Besides, at the last community meeting, the landlords up and said this isn't about quaint little part time open house hosts.  They say they want to turn whole neighborhoods into permanent resort villas. Where the help... and in the context of a fully realized sharing economy we are all pretty well described as "the help".. goes to live when that happens, is really not their problem.
 

Corporate nullification

But everyone loves them some Ubers.

In February, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky compared his firm’s defiance of local housing ordinances with that of Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule. Meanwhile, a tweeter compared Uber to Rosa Parks, defying unjust laws. Chesky quickly backed down after widespread mockery. Companies acting out of self-interest comparing themselves with the noble heroes of civil rights movements is as absurd as it is insulting.

But there is a better analogy from the US civil rights era for law-flouting firms of the on-demand economy. It’s just not the one corporate leaders claim. They are engaged in what we call “corporate nullification”, following in the footsteps of Southern governors and legislatures in the United States who declared themselves free to “nullify” federal law on the basis of strained and opportunistic constitutional interpretation.

Clever. What we need now is a map that marks Airbnb locations with little Confederate flag icons. 

On today's episode of Hillary Clinton Is The Worst

While we're still figuring out how much fun we had at poor Bernie Sanders' expense last weekend (much of it deserved.. more on that later),  now is a good time to remind ourselves that Hillary Clinton Is The Worst.

Bill Clinton’s overhaul of the welfare system, which was passed in conjunction with a Republican-controlled Congress, replaced a major federal welfare program with block grants to states, required adults to find a job within two years of receiving aid, placed a five-year limit on aid, blocked future legal immigrants from welfare assistance, and cut $24 billion in food stamps. It was denounced by many Democrats, including Peter Edelman, who resigned from his post at the Department of Health and Human Services, arguing that the law would do “serious injury to American children.”

The rest of that article is a series of snippets in which Hillary is being the worst person to families her husband was cutting off of welfare. My favorite parts are when later Senator Clinton starts talking about "deadbeats."

In an April 2002 interview with the Gettysburg Times, then-Senator Clinton reiterated the impetus behind her husband’s effort to “substitute dignity for dependence.” At the time, Congress was considering the reauthorization the 1996 law.

“There were people in the White House who said, ‘just sign anything,’ you know,’ the New York senator said in an interview. ‘And I thought that was wrong. We wanted to do it in a way that kept faith with our goals: End welfare as we know it, substitute dignity for dependence, but make work pay.’”

In that same interview, Clinton also said that people who had moved from welfare to work were “no longer deadbeats.”

“Now that we’ve said these people are no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive—how do we keep them there?”

To put it bluntly, Hillary Clinton doesn't care about poor people. She doesn't care how many she has to throw to the wolves to get elected.

Today, she was asked some pointed questions about the emergence of the "gig" economy where wolves like Uber and Taskrabbit take advantage of the desperation of underemployed people with no social benefits. These over-capitalized start-ups are sinking a lot of money into political advertising this year so candidates may be wary of offending them. Her answer, predictably, was a dodge.

Today @HillaryClinton got asked if she supported the idea of a #basicincome due to automation. This was her response. pic.twitter.com/QMHsLks3gV

— Scott Santens (@2noame) July 21, 2015

The question really wasn't about the ACA. But it's important to emphasize that the "innovation" she doesn't want to stifle is these companies' ability to exploit vulnerable and therefore pliable and cheap labor. That's what the "gig" economy is. And that scheme can't operate if we get too many "deadbeats" running around with no imperative to feed it.

The business model

It all goes out the window once you have to treat people as employees just because they're doing all the work for you.

A San Francisco-based driver for smartphone-based ride-hailing service Uber is an employee, not a contractor, according to a ruling by the California Labor Commission.

The ruling, filed on Tuesday in state court in San Francisco, was the latest in a host of legal and regulatory challenges facing Uber and other highly valued start-ups in the United States and other countries.

The commission said Uber is "involved in every aspect of the operation."

Classifying Uber drivers as employees opens the company up to considerably higher costs, including Social Security, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. That could affect its valuation, currently above $40 billion, and the valuation of other companies that rely on large networks of individuals to provide rides, clean houses and other services.

Uber, of course, insists that it's merely an app.  All these drivers are just using the service as independent contractors. Other than that, the company doesn't have anything to do with them or their business.

Uber has landed in hot water before for tracking the movements of passengers without their permission. But what about tracking its own drivers? Obviously, the company needs to do that in order to know where drivers are in real time so that it can supply rides. According to the Wall Street Journal, though, this past weekend in Hangzhou, Uber found another use for that GPS data: scaring drivers into staying away from a protest over its service:

In two short messages sent to Uber drivers in Hangzhou and circulated online—verified with Uber in China by The Wall Street Journal—Uber urged its drivers not to go the scene and instructed those already there to leave immediately. Uber said it would use GPS to identify drivers that had refused to leave the location and cancel its contracts with them. The messages said Uber’s actions were designed to “maintain social order.”

Well.. okay.. sure. Somebody's got to "maintain social order." What better use can you think of for an app, really? 

Life immitates clickbait

Apparently this is real life. Insofar as real life can reasonably be said to exist anymore.

You could drive the roughly 90-minute drive to Bonnaroo from Nashville. 

Or you could take a helicopter. 

The seemingly omnipresent ride-sharing service announced Wednesday that for a mere $1,500, you and two friends could ride to the Tennessee music festival in style, with its service branded as UberCHOPPER.

Sounds fun.

Meanwhile... real life
 

In April, Darrin McGillis filed for unemployment benefits from Uber, claiming that he was unable to continue driving for the company after his vehicle was damaged. Uber is already facing a handful of lawsuits alleging that drivers should be classified, treated and paid as employees, but McGillis effectively jumped the line. With his claim approved by the state, he is effectively Uber’s first employee driver — and a forerunner of likely more legal trouble to come for the growing app-based service economy that relies on legions of underpaid and underprotected contract workers in order to boost their profits.

The feudal sharing economy

At least they're starting to admit who they are.

The "vision" of Mr Brian Chesky, the celebrated CEO of the other billionaire new kid on the block of the sharing economy: AirBnb, comes very close to this new feudalism. That's what he said in an interview reported by Venture Beat: "In essence, Brian Chesky wants a world more like the villages of old: highly trusting and filled with micro-entrepreneurs who shared their assets to make a living. Cities used to be generally villages, and everyone was essentially kind of like an entrepreneur,” he told a packed room at the Atlantic Aspen Ideas Festival. “You were either a farmer, or you worked in the city as a blacksmith, or you had some kind of trade. And then the Industrial Revolution happened". Just put the word "serf" where he uses "entrepreneur", and you've got the whole picture. He likes this world so much, this is our bright future in his vision, with the multitude being those micro serfs depending on the moods of the Lord of the Village, Brian Chesky himself of course

Today the front pages of your local newspapers are trumpeting the city council's recent licensing of UberX to operate in Orleans Parish.  Everyone is very gung-ho.

City officials have said they would be able to start processing applications from ride-hailing services as soon as the regulations become law.

“We are stepping out of our comfort zone and leading on a cutting-edge issue,” Councilman Jared Brossett, who drafted the regulations along with Councilwoman Susan Guidry, said in a statement. “This law strikes the right balance. It serves the needs of our citizens and visitors in adding a new high-tech model to complement our traditional for-hire industry. The bottom line is that this will lead to a strengthened transportation environment for all.”

But the so-called Sharing Economy is, by its very nature, not built to "serve the needs of our citizens."  Unless, you limit your concept of "our citizens" to the very wealthy which Susan Guidry and Jared Brossett very well might. 

Covering the latest app has become commonplace because it’s the latest thing, and therefore it must be cool and life-changing. While it’s “cool” to most of the world, it’s only “life-changing” to those who can shell out the cash for the lifestyle—which is a lot of the journalists writing about them.

Matter’s Lauren Smiley, who lives in the building in which her story is set, referred to these apps’ users as members of the “Shut-In Economy.” The piece describes them as aware of their #whitepeopleproblems, but unapologetically so. “Basically, people a lot like herself,” Smiley wrote, referring to a woman who epitomized this new economy: the class of men and women who are late 20s to early 30s, have a high income and use on-demand services without batting an eye. “That’s the common wisdom: The apps are created by the urban young for the needs of urban young.” Last week, New York Magazine’s Annie Lowrey took it a step further and lived with only these modern conveniences for two weeks. Her piece was slapped with a painfully tone-deaf headline: “Will the New Concierge Economy Mean the End of the Errand?"

Of course not. For the vast majority of us, the inconvenience of running errands doesn’t outweigh the financial costs of doing it ourselves.

High income 20 and 30 somethings. Those are the only people who have any representation in city government these days. Even if those aren't the people who actually live here, they do comprise the population New Orleans's political class aspires to represent.  We've only been slightly more successful than Baton Rouge at affecting this demographic change.  But just look at how sad it makes them.

The parish's birth rate and international migration basically carried the area's population growth. And according to Louisiana demographer Elliott, Stonecipher, that's not good.

International migration, it's safe to assume, is mostly derived from Latin America, he said -- mainly from Mexico. These newcomers mostly work in low-wage jobs, and in many cases are not in the country legally. Therefore, they pay little or no taxes.

"That's why you hear politicians (talk of attracting) quality in-migrants," Stonecipher said. "It's not a value judgment."

Leaders of most metropolitans, and especially in Baton Rouge, actively seek to attract young, educated professionals who are currently busting at the seams in places like Austin, Texas, to grow and maintain their tax base.

While population data for Baton Rouge might appear to reflect younger, quality migrants, Stonecipher said it's not likely the case. Hispanic migrants tend to be younger and of childbearing age, so international migration growth can be easily confused to suggest growth of quality, domestic migrants.

You really have to feel for these "metropolitan leaders." They're trying to select a better quality of people to serve but keep ending up with all these dang Mexicans.  This is literally the complaint they are making. Seems like democracy was supposed to work the other way around. But who knows anymore.

In any case, they're probably too quick to dismiss their competitive advantage since "concierge apps" are only possible when you have a ready supply of cheap and desperate labor to feed them.

There are still only twenty-four hours in a day. When “downtime” is turned into work time, and that work time is unpredictable and low-paid, what happens to personal relationships? Family? One’s own health?

Other proponents of on-demand work point to studies, such as one recently commissioned by Uber, showing Uber’s on-demand workers to be “happy.”

But how many of them would be happier with a good-paying job offering regular hours?

An opportunity to make some extra bucks can seem mighty attractive in an economy whose median wage has been stagnant for thirty years and almost all of whose economic gains have been going to the top.

That doesn’t make the opportunity a great deal. It only shows how bad a deal most working people have otherwise been getting.

And maybe this is the future of regionalism in South Louisiana.  Nobody actually lives in Orleans Parish but it's a swell place to vacation (or own property if you can afford it.)  So get yourself to NOLA, luxury citizen! While you're there you can call on a vast army of chauffeurs and errand do-ers to keep you comfortable simply by punching some buttons on your phone. They live just outside the city or just up I-10 a bit.

Of course, when you do get here,  you'll need a place to stay and/or rent out at too damn high prices.  The city council is working on that for you too.

Turf wars

Malachi Hull is suing. 

The former head of the New Orleans Taxicab Bureau has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of New Orleans, claiming he was wrongfully fired for expressing concerns about the "ride-sharing" transportation service Uber.

Thou shalt not take the name of Uber in vain.. or so goes the claim, I guess. I'm sure several people will yell at me over the next several weeks that Hull is a bad person and such. Maybe they're right. But consider this is a main part of the argument against him.

The city fired Hull in July 2014 after two Taxicab Bureau investigators under his supervision were charged with assault. After Hull was fired, Inspector General Ed Quatreveaux released a damning report on his tenure as director, accusing Hull of operating a rogue agency that allowed its employees to carry mace, handcuffs and act like a quasi-police force.

Note that one year after firing this "rogue" for creating a "quasi-police force,"  the city has gotten together with the hospitality industry (some aspects of which Hull's department once regulated) to create its own quasi-police force. 

You call that living?

City Council has a lot of terrible legislation pending before it in the next few weeks.  Council members Guidry and Head are sponsoring ordinances designed to regulate (they say).. but really.. authorize and sanction Uber and Airbnb in Orleans Parish. Not to mention, also, the noise ordinance is on the way back.  The city has already signaled they may want it to be back with teeth.   More on all of that later.. but I'm convinced this is by far the most right wing city government I've seen in operation during my adult life, at least. 

The good news is, it ain't all bad.

Yesterday District D Council member Jared Brossett introduced an ordinance that would require all contractors doing business with the city to pay a minimum wage of $10.10. 

Brossett, who introduced the ordinance last week, bills it as a "living wage" proposal similar to others approved in progressive cities around the country.

"I am a firm believer that economic opportunity is one the cornerstones of a thriving city," Brossett said Monday (Jan. 26). "Sadly, too many of our citizens don't have that opportunity. A job by itself is not the type of opportunity we need. A good-paying job is what our people need. And if your company wants to do business with the city, we want them to pay you a living wage."

Nevermind that $10.10 is hardly what we could call a "living wage." If you think people can or should be able to live on that, well, as President Obama said, last week, "You try it."

Nevermind, also, that Brossett's proposal conflicts with (an admittedly egregious) 1997 state law (sponsored by our friends David Vitter and Steve Scalise, btw) which specifically prohibits municipalities from passing this kind of ordinance.  Of course such a law deserves a good challenge every now and then.  The last attempt at this was rejected by the State Supreme Court, unfortunately.  Lamar has all of the details here.

My point, though, is that Brossett's proposal, while not exactly a bad idea, is kind of a waste of time and attention because 1) the proposed wage is insufficient to meet any reasonable definition of a "living wage," and 2) it effectively accomplishes nothing baring either a reversal of a Supreme Court decision or a new constitutional amendment.  It makes for a nice headline, of course, but carries little purpose else.

So, like I said, it ain't all bad.. but it ain't all great either.

Last week's very reasonable smoking ordinance is another interesting case. I know some people are.. um... put out by it.. but the law they ended up passing is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people working in service industry jobs.  (And, yes, I'm looking forward to never again coming home smelling like smoke.) Still, it's worth paying attention to the Machivellian  process by which the smoking ban made its way through passage.

The original draft of Council Member Cantrell's ordinance was intentionally bloated with draconian overreach. The ordinance, as written, would have pushed smokers, not only out of the bar, but at least 25 feet away from the front door of the building before they could light up.  This would have caused concerns about negative effect on the surrounding neighborhoods.

The ordinance, as written, would have banned the indoor use of electronic cigarettes.  This might actually be a good idea but it was pretty difficult to justify given what we currently know abut the effects of second-hand vape.

The vaping provision was so ridiculous, in fact, that it dominated much of the public debate on the ordinance. Of course, this was always going to be a bit of a circus. Bar owners and casino managers were certain to complain the moment the ban was conceived.  Interesting, though, that throwing the oddball vapists in with their lot caused their arguments to appear more risible than they otherwise might have. Sort of a subtraction by addition.  I can't help but wonder whether this was calculated.

The ordinance, as written, also included some absurdly severe enforcement provisions which, like all of the others above, had to be amended out.

Yesterday, at-large councilman Jason Williams introduced an amendment to remove NOPD as an enforcement agency. That amendment was approved. NOPD and the still-in-progress NOLA Patrol will not carry out enforcement of the ordinance. District E Councilman James Gray also objected to a community service requirement for people unable to pay the fine. That amendment also was approved. Rather than mandate seven hours of community service to anyone unable to pay the fine, it will now be left to a judge's discretion.

Enforcement of the ordinance is largely incumbent upon businesses to remind smokers to step outside. Bar owners and managers, under the ordinance, must ask smoking patrons to put out their cigarette.

Williams said removing the NOPD from the picture "makes sure we don’t overburden or add an additional burden on the NOPD for a smoke-free New Orleans."

"It would be poor judgement to take police officers off the street for even a minute (to address smoking)," he said."

"It’s not a great thing if it becomes a tool of oppression for some people in this city," Gray added, suggesting that the ordinance could become an excuse to "stop young black men in the street" simply for smoking.

Noble sentiments from Gray and from Williams, of course.  Isn't it neat the way they got to step in and be heroes at the last minute there? Gray, Williams, and Nadine Ramsey got to make a big show of cutting all the nasty parts out of Cantrell's ordinance.  The opposition got to shout into the void. And, of course, the ordinance passed. Everybody wins!

You'd almost think the whole process was a sham and everything was planned out well in advance... you know.. if you thought that's how this stuff worked, anyway.

New Orleans still hasn't figured out Uber, which is why we're still pushing to expand it

Just as the rest of the country is finally getting wise to a particular kind of grift, New Orleans is plunging head first into an effort to adopt it. It's a longstanding pattern of ours.

In effect, the measure also will be another step easing the way in New Orleans for Uber, a company that has stirred controversy nationally by challenging the established taxi and limousine industries with a service that connects drivers and passengers via smartphone.

Council President Stacy Head called the two-limousine requirement an “artificial and unreasonable barrier” that does not accommodate the level of demand from the city’s residents and visitors for for-hire limousine service.

“We still cannot in certain parts of the city command taxis at certain times and in certain neighborhoods, particularly if you are not in the downtown area,” Head said.

In case you are like Stacy Head and haven't been keeping up with Uber.. or don't quite understand what this company actually does, here are some links.

Uber is the poster company for what is known popularly as the "sharing economy." This is the phenomenon by which numerous service industries that once provided stable full time employment for thousands of people are "disrupted" by a new model based on on-demand freelance piecemeal labor.

For a while, this made them very popular with the mainstream press because 1) the mainstream press reflexively loves tech magic and 2) the mainstream press reflexively loves things that punish poor people for being losers. But after a few years of scrutiny, people started catching onto a few things.

Uber collects a lot of data.  A taxi company usually just needs to know where you are and where you want to go.  Uber wants to know everywhere you've ever been and to maintain possession of that information indefinitely. Because your data is a commodity, this helps explain why Uber is such a highly capitalized start-up.  "Ride sharing" is only half of their business. The other half is selling what you might have expected was private information.

A person who had a job interview in Uber’s Washington office in 2013 said he got the kind of access enjoyed by actual employees for an entire day, even for several hours after the job interview ended. He happily crawled through the database looking up the records of people he knew – including a family member of a prominent politician – before the seemingly magical power disappeared.

“What an Uber employee would have is everything, complete,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company.

A more sophisticated – and malicious – person with that access could have scraped data on a massive scale, then used powerful analytical software to learn things that Uber users might want to keep private, for professional or personal reasons.

Okay, but surely this is just paranoia.  Another round of privacy concern trolling from the luddites, right?  Well, no, actually it turns out the "sophisticated and malicious" people referred to here do indeed exist.  You don't have to look hard to find them.  They are Uber executives.

And, I think this is where they've started to dig a hole for themselves.  See, if you're a tech bro superstar, you can be as dickish and exploitative as you want to most people. Remember, the press loves tech stuff and doesn't give a shit about poor people for the most part.  But when you start bullying journalists themselves, that's when they turn on you.

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

So Uber is an asshole's business run by assholes in an openly assholish fashion.  The assholes who own the company are celeb-billionaires while their typical driver pulls down about $34,000 per year.

Uber, and companies like it, exist because they exploit a particularly cruel paradox from the point of view of most people who work. The more productive we become, the less valuable we become.. in strict monetary terms.  We're reaching a point, in fact, where most of us, despite whatever reasonable education or skills we might posses, are essentially useless. And it's going to get worse.

Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.

And over the same 15-year period that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of life, the job market has fallen into a long malaise. Even with the economy’s recent improvement, the share of working-age adults who are working is substantially lower than a decade ago — and lower than any point in the 1990s.

Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology would create as many jobs as it destroyed. Now many are not so sure.

This could be a terrible disaster for many many people. Already it goes a long way to explaining the onset of the so-called "sharing economy."  People still need money. And now large pools of them are underemployed and willing to work piecemeal.

There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone. First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins.

Uber was founded in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the worst financial crisis in a generation. As the ride-sharing app has risen, so too have income disparity and wealth inequality in the United States as a whole and in San Francisco in particular. Recent research by the Brookings Institution found that of any US city, San Francisco had the largest increase in inequality between 2007 and 2012. The disparity in San Francisco as of 2012, as measured (pdf) by a city agency, was in fact more pronounced than inequality in Mumbai (pdf).

It doesn't have to be this way, of course.  The Luddites were wrong.  Technology is not what creates inequality.  Technology helps us create wealth in unprecedented abundance.  But as greater numbers of people become unnecessary to the process of wealth creation, we need to arrive at a more humane means of distributing it than labor.  The solution could be as simple as just giving people free money.

But there may be a solution. Some might see it as radical, but advocates, both libertarian and liberal, are suggesting straight up cash: a guaranteed subsidy to everyone. "We've got to a technological level now where no one needs to work the traditional 40-hour week," says Barbara Jacobson, chair of Unconditional Basic Income–Europe, an alliance of European citizens and organizations that advocate for such subsidies. But while productivity per hour across developing nations has increased dramatically since the 1970s, “this has not meant a rise in wages, or a fall in hours without a pay cut,” says Jacobson. And on top of that, she adds, there is a significant amount of “crucial work, generally caring work, which isn't paid for, but without which society would collapse.” The people doing this type of work—parenting and elder care, for example—often end up broke; if you are a single parent, it’s often not feasible to hold a traditional, wage-paying job while also taking care of three kids and your mother who has Alzheimer’s.

A simple cash subsidy—$15,000 per year (which is about what the average retiree gets annually from Social Security) for every household, say—would give the poor and middle class a financial floor on which they could live, take care of their loved ones and maybe, says Jacobson, "think about what really needs doing, what they would like to do, what they have trained to do, as opposed to simply what someone might hire them to do."

On the other hand if policymakers choose to keep things as they are, then the only "billion dollar ideas" churned out at your local Entrepreneur Week hackathon  will be the ones which most cleverly exploit a market of virtually free labor provided by increasingly desperate poor people.  Which is one reason Uber retains all these lobbyists. They want to keep the regulatory environment friendly to their business model.  They probably don't have to spend too much effort convincing Stacy Head, though.

You and your superior conscientiousness are meaningless

We live in a libertarian age. Everyone wants to believe they have some individual power to change the world just by being a "better consumer."  It doesn't work that way.

I try to be an ethical consumer, but I also find myself thinking that that very concept is a farce and leads to a kind of preening self-righteousness—the moral equivalent of bragging that you don’t own a TV when someone asks what you think of Homeland. And it can be tiring to submit each company with which we interact through some personalized better business bureau. We run the risk of attaining false consciousness and, through our supposedly conscious consumption, buttressing the kinds of bad actors we claim to oppose.

The virtue of the regulatory state is that it takes these ethical impulses of ours and cements them as policy. No wonder that cyber-libertarians, like Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, hate regulation; it does the exact opposite of what they claim that their technologies do. Regulation takes responsibility out of individual hands and entrusts it to a larger, more powerful body. There’s good reason for this; civil rights, privacy among them, are a collective matter. The law is supposed to act as a guarantor for us all, especially those who don’t have the resources to fight for their own protections. An infringement on Sarah Lacy’s privacy, or on a nameless Uber driver’s labor rights, is potentially an infringement on mine and yours as well.

It's all about ethics in journalism

Turns out Gamergate was actually Uber the whole time.

A senior executive at Uber suggested recently that his company fight back against the press by hiring a team tasked with digging up dirt on critical journalists and spreading information about their personal lives, according to a Buzzfeed report published Monday.

Here's the thing, though.  For some time now, it has been clear to anyone who cares that the new temp economy of which Uber is a significant part is a scam designed to exploit an increasingly desperate workforce in order to enrich a few tech bros. 

 Despite the overwhelming obviousness of this, the general feeling among journalists has been basically pro-Uber.  Josh Marshall even introduces the above TPM story this way.

Lots of my friends can't live without Uber. But more and more evidence that it's a wildly sleazy operation at the highest levels.

But even that is absurdly myopic.  The problem isn't just that these Uber guys are sleazy (they are).  The problem is that the entire "sharing economy" is sleazy.  You'd think a herd of people whose own profession is being chipped apart into a constant hustle of freelance piecework would recognize the problem here. 

World's greatest boss

Uber

Uber makes that money by relying on a network of thousands of drivers who are not technically employees of the company, but rather independent contractors — the company calls them “driver-partners” — who receive a percentage of its fares.

From the very beginning, Uber attracted drivers with a bait-and-switch. Take the company’s launch in LA: In May 2013, Uber charged customers a fare of $2.75 per mile (with an additional 60¢ per minute under eleven mph). Drivers got to keep 80 percent of the fare. Working full time, drivers could make a living wage: between 15 and $20 an hour.

Drivers rushed to sign up, and thousands leased and bought cars just to work for Uber — especially immigrants and low-income people desperate for a well-paying job in a terrible economy. But over the last year, the company has faced stiff competition from its arch-rival, Lyft. To raise demand and push Lyft out of the LA market, Uber has cut UberX fares nearly in half: to $1.10 per mile, plus 21¢ a minute.

Uber drivers have no say in the pricing, yet they must carry their own insurance and foot the bill for gas and repairs — a cost of 56¢ per mile, according to IRS estimates. With Uber’s new pricing model, drivers are forced to work under razor-thin margins. Arman, for instance, made about $20 an hour just a year ago. And now? Some days he doesn’t even break minimum wage.

"Bait and switch" is a favorite maneuver at Uber which recentlyy wedged its way in the New Orleans market. It did so only by agreeing to operate its "Uber Black" limo service rather than the "UberX" taxi-like ride sharing scheme which is where its bread and butter is made. They clearly intended to defy this agreement almost immediately.

Here they are pretty much doing exactly that.

Limited.. but not really

The glories of unfettered capitalism.... or at least the kind that seeps in under the pretense of having been fettered a little. 

The City Council cleared the way for Uber and similar cellphone-based ride services that are popular in other cities to begin operating in New Orleans on Thursday.

The council voted 4-3 in favor of an ordinance that would allow a premium service called Uber Black to operate luxury vehicles with professional drivers in the city, though not the broader, lower-cost UberX service that makes use of individuals who drive their own cars. Councilmembers James Gray, Susan Guidry and Nadine Ramsey voted against the measure.

Well they say UberX is not allowed by this ordinance but it also wasn't explicitly prohibited.

Two other ordinances relating to Uber have been pulled from consideration for the time being.
One of them, by Brossett, would have created new classes of limousines, including one that cut a rule requiring operators to maintain at least two cars.

The other, also by Brossett, sought to define services commonly referred to as "ride sharing," which are the more attention-getting and also controversial aspects of services like Uber. It also would have prohibited those services and set penalties for defying the ban.

Uber says it only plans to introduce its high-end car service, not ride sharing, but speakers on Thursday argued ride sharing inevitably follows. 

And anyway, a few of the councilmembers appear to have actually paid at least a little attention to how Uber operates in every other market it has entered and formed a reasonable opinion of how things might also go here. 

UberX, meanwhile is a ride-sharing service that also uses app technology to hail a car, but it uses ordinary drivers who are employed by Uber and Uber only. City Councilmembers Susan Guidry and James Gray have been the most vocal about what they see as the dangers of UberX, citing the lack of insurance drivers employed by Uber are required to carry and the concern that UberX's drivers have not been properly vetted by the city.

Guidry has warned at meeting after meeting that Uber X will be a reality for New Orleans as soon as the company grabs a foothold with Uber Black. Previously, Hayes has denied that accusation, saying that Uber Black is what's on the table. It is illegal for non-CPNC-holding individuals to drive for hire here, and representatives from the mayor's office who introduced the proposed ordinance said that the city will do its best to enforce the law. To that, Guidry responded, "We don't even have a head of the taxicab bureau." (Malachi Hull, the city's controversial Taxicab Bureau director, was fired in July and has not been replaced.)

"I feel like we're letting ourselves in for a world of hurt," Guidry said. "If we had stronger laws, I'd be more comfortable with this."

Al Hebron, the president of Flagship Limousines, called UberX "unenforceable" in his remarks to the council in opposition to the proposed ordinance. "Booting, tickets … mean nothing to an $18 billion company," he said. 

Amazingly, others in the room... and many around town since the day this argument began... continue to blow these facts off as conspiracy theory.  Even when faced with obvious evidence.

Two men, Christian Hebron and Carl Traub, both announced to the council that they had applied to work as drivers for UberX in New Orleans, and both had already begun the hiring process. Uber posted a call for drivers on the local job site worknola.com today. Hebron said Uber asked about his vehicle, but Traub said the company did not. Both men said Uber did not ask them about their own personal insurance.

Let's hook our private lives up to the giant omnipotent banking machine

What could possibly go wrong?

It’s only natural that the less fortunate, under the burden of austerity, are turning their kitchens into restaurants, their cars into taxis, and their personal data into financial assets. What else can they do? For Silicon Valley, this is a triumph of entrepreneurship — a spontaneous technological development, unrelated to the financial crisis. But it is only as entrepreneurial as those who are driven — by the need to pay rent — into prostitution or selling their body parts. Governments might resist this tide but they have budgets to balance: Uber and Airbnb will eventually be allowed to exploit this “gold mine” as they please, boosting tax revenues and helping citizens make ends meet.

The “sharing economy” won’t supplant the debt economy; they will coexist. The increased liquidity of data, combined with more and better tools of analysis, already allows banks to tap the techniques of Big Data to extend credit to “unbankables” while identifying and excluding the true deviants. This would only raise anxiety over debt. Start-ups like ZestFinance, which studies 70,000 data points — including how you type and how you use your phone — already help banks decide whether online applicants are worthy of a loan. A scheme pioneered in Colombia by Lenddo, another tech-savvy lending start-up, links the approval of credit cards to applicants’ activity on social media, so now their every click can affect their suitability for credit — a point not lost on Douglas Merrill, the co-founder of ZestFinance, who says that “all data is credit data”. Well, if all data is credit data, then all life — captured by digital sensors in the world around us — beats to the rhythms of debt.