New Orleans     Tech lobbyists, led by Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are now spending almost as much as the automobile industry on Washington, DC lobbyists.  That’s not good news for the rest of us.

            A lot of the lobbying, according to recent reports, at both the federal, state, and local level is from Uber and the Uber-wannabe companies that have a huge vested interested in promoting the so-called “gig economy,” as if it is a revolutionary and utopian step forward for workers.  It almost goes without saying that anytime companies start claiming that what they think is best for their workers, eyebrows and probably voices need to be readied and raised in protest. 

            Uber, as many urban dwellers know, is the high flying tech company that is hard to define somewhere between being an application that consumers can carry on their smartphones to a huge employer of drivers, according to most recent rulings by labor standards regulators in the state of California.  They see themselves in tech-speak as “disruptors,” and in this case they disrupt the taxi industry and the huge number of drivers who work in that, admittedly imperfect, world where workers are already routinely misclassified as subcontractors already.  Uber’s defense in legal proceedings filed by some of its drivers in California is that people just love this part-time, no benefits, casual, work.  Maybe some do, but many don’t.

            Other tech companies in the wannabe Uber world are also trying to develop apps that will replace full-time workers with casual, contingent workers.  Some, sniffing the legal pleadings and understanding that the breeze is not blowing these days in favor of more worker exploitation even in this Age of Inequality in the USA, actually have done the right thing and classified their workers as employees, just as they should.  Crying like stuck pigs, they have jumped into the lobbying game because they want to see if there’s some way, some loophole, some wink-and-nod that would allow them to reclassify their workers as free agents and on their own.

            You might ask the reason they offer about why this is new and different?  Well, they say, to no one’s shock, that it cost them money:  social security payments, unemployment, health insurance, and workman’s compensation – the whole package.  How does that sound like a “new economy?  In fact it seems word to word like exactly the same complaint that employers have been making for decades as they plead for the right and wherefore to be able to completely exploit their workforce and then walk away when they are out of work, elderly, hurt, or sick.

            The answer from Washington, state capitals, and city halls needs to be the same to these new hustlers as it should be and sometimes has been to the old employers:  shut up and pay up!  Hiring workers is not a license for exploitation.  We have an app for that and it’s called laws that prevent it.