>> Lyft has decided to donate a whopping $14 million to an effort to defeat or
for an effort to essentially reclassify workers in the state
of Massachusetts as private contractors.
And the reason why they wanna do this is to do away with certain labor protections
that typical workers, yes, believe it or not,
there are some labor protections that typical workers are able to benefit from.
Now this is essentially an effort to ensure that Massachusetts follows
through on what California has done to app based workers individuals
in the gig economy, and it has been absolutely devastating.
This followed the passage of proposition 22 in California, it allowed for
Uber, Lyft, Instacart all these app based companies to reclassify their
workers as private contractors and that allowed them to avoid having to pay for
certain benefits, it allowed them to avoid having to pay them minimum wage.
Let me give you some details here.
So what exactly does this entail?
Such a policy, would free companies like Lyft from having to pay a minimum wage or
provide certain workplace rights protections and
benefits that employees receive.
While proponents of the Lyf-backed measure, which has also received
more than $1 million in funding from each Uber, DoorDash and
Instacart argue that it would actually protect driver flexibility and
confer benefits including health care stipends and paid sick leave.
Labor advocates counter that gig workers
should already receive such rights under existing laws.
So this is incredibly terrifying,
because we've actually seen firsthand what happened to app based workers,
people in the gig economy in California after the passage of prop 22,
after these companies were able to reclassify them as private contractors,
many of them saw a significant drop in their earnings,
many of them realized that there were certain things that were abusive.
For instance, Uber workers, Rideshare workers weren't getting paid for
the time that they were spending in their car.
They were only now getting paid for the rides that they were actively giving.
So someone had to be in their car,
they had to be giving them a ride in order to earn any money at all.
And there were all sorts of other downsides to this.
And so workers felt they were swindled,
that they were bamboozled into supporting this with the notion of flexibility,
but the downsides ended up overwhelming the potential upsides.
What are your thoughts on what's happening here and
what do you think we can do to kind of mitigate it,
fight back against it and prevent it from spreading across the country?
>> What they're so effective at doing and
generally this is what companies wanna do is they wanna isolate the workers.
They want them to think of themselves as individuals, you're not part
of our Uber and Lyft workforce, you're an entrepreneur, you're doing your thing,
you need your flexibility, this is your gig, this is the thing that you're doing
to fund your real passion, even though you're putting in hours and
hours of work for these companies to profit indiscriminately, right?
And that's what they effectively did here in California where a lot of people,
well yeah, my lift drivers said they do like the flexibility,
they do like making their own hours.
They don't wanna be part of some huge,
massive workforce because as we know, and if the workers,
if the drivers start to think about themselves as one unified workforce,
they can collectively shut that thing down and make demands and force concessions.
And so of course, they're, they're always gonna frame it as these guys
aren't our workers, they're private contractors.
They work on behalf of themselves,
even though they're making these people hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
And so yeah, we saw that work in California.
And again, you just gotta watch the framing of the argument here where they're
just basically always no, you guys aren't part of one big Lyft,
Uber community, you're by yourselves obviously get the next Bill Gates.
>> Yeah, that's exactly right.
And workers unfortunately fell forward in California.
And it's my hope that Rideshare workers,
gig economy workers in other states, really educate themselves on
the ramifications of this kind of predatory behavior really.
Because look, any company, if you just take a step back and look at
the motivations through a materialist lens and how the system really works,
you can understand what is driving these app based companies to push for this.
They're not doing it because they're concerned about the freedom and
flexibility of their workers.
They're doing it because they want ensure that they maximize their profits, right?
And so here's a perfect example of that.
This is a great tweet that shows how the market reacts to
this ballot measure in Massachusetts.
Tech stocks doing well today, but none as well as Uber and Lyft,
which have surged 15 and 18% respectively on news their
ballot measure to deny driver's employment past.
So this is actually in response to California, and the passage of prop 22.
And so you see that Uber and Lyft obviously increase the value of
their shares because investors are, yummy, in my tummy.
I see what's happening here, we see a future increase in profits,
which means a return on our investment.
I mean the markets certainly communicate something here.
>> Yeah, and you got to understand what's good for investors,
generally speaking isn't good for
the workers of whatever company we're talking about every now and again, right?
You might get the occasion where all we're making record profits,
record sales, which means the workforce is getting record salaries and
record benefits, but that's most nine times out of ten.
That's not the case, how they're driving revenue is
by decreasing costs by jerking over the workforce.
That's always the case and nobody knows this better than Wall Street than,
the class of people who are on those boards of corporate raiders who come into
companies and gut them limb from limb and which usually means getting rid of people,
slashing salaries, slashing benefits.
We know how this works.
When Wall Street thinks of profits, they're thinking about cutting costs,
that's it.
And the cost is you Uber driver and Lyft driver.
>> Exactly, absolutely.