The Four-Income Trap, Labor Day edition; voting ghost stories; and will your face predict you'll be late with rent?
What Bob's reading
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Sorry about that bad day in the stock market, but remember: You don’t lose it until you sell it.
Let’s celebrate honest work
This weekend is Labor Day, and like many holidays, I think the real meaning of the occasion is often lost on us. So here’s my food for thought. I’ve written often about the dark side of the gig economy — what I sometimes call The Four Income Trap, or the side hustle trap. The trap is real, and even more real this Labor Day. The pandemic and remote working will only accelerate gig work adoption. This Bloomberg story about Amazon delivery drivers trying to game the system by hanging smartphones in trees illustrates what I fear most: we are currently in a race to the bottom that has no bottom.
Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement, according to experts and people with direct knowledge of Amazon’s operations, is to take advantage of the handsets’ proximity to the station, combined with software that constantly monitors Amazon’s dispatch network, to get a split-second jump on competing drivers.
That drivers resort to such extreme methods is emblematic of the ferocious competition for work in a pandemic-ravaged U.S. economy suffering from double-digit unemployment. Much the way milliseconds can mean millions to hedge funds using robotraders, a smartphone perched in a tree can be the key to getting a $15 delivery route before someone else.
Yes, Amazon drivers are using smartphones to “front run” the package delivery market, Flash Boys style. Only they are fighting over pennies, not billions.
To make matters even more…personally humiliating?…Amazon is reportedly snooping on driver tricks like this through a large Internet dragnet. This, from Vice’s Motherboard:
According to the files left online, Amazon corporate employees are getting regular reports about the social media posts of its Flex drivers on nominally private pages, and are using these reports to diagnose problems as well as monitor, for example, drivers "planning for any strike or protest against Amazon." The reports have the full names and posts of drivers who post anything noteworthy in one of dozens of closed driver Facebook pages, intended for use by Flex Drivers.
Of course, a pandemic and a corresponding recession is a great time to mistreat workers. They have almost no bargaining power now. That means reports of wage theft — not paying workers for the hours they’ve worked — are way up, according to this New York Times story.
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a liberal think tank (reports) the rate at which workers suffered violations of minimum-wage law increased almost in lock step with the unemployment rate during the last recession. On average, the workers on the receiving end of these violations lost about one-fifth of their hourly wage. The paper’s numbers show that more than 20 percent of low-wage workers were probably paid less than what the law requires in April, when the unemployment rate peaked, up from just over 10 percent before the pandemic.
There is no place in America for cheating honest workers out of pay for time worked. But as with all stories, it’s not quite as simple as that. There’s a system in place which nearly forces small businesses to behave this way. When all your competition is cheating and getting away with underpaying workers, it’s nearly impossible to avoid doing this same. Basically, that’s the only way most restaurants and bars function.
I make this point in Gotcha Capitalism over and over: No one can afford to be the only honest poker player at a game of cheats. Plenty of honest firms would welcome clear rules and strong enforcement to ensure a level playing field. Sadly, in many industries, owners can’t afford to be honest. That’s not capitalism, that’s Gotcha Capitalism.
The lack of effective regulation reverberates through entire industries, Ms. Fine and her colleagues write: Unchecked wage theft allows unscrupulous employers to undercut their law-abiding competitors and puts pressure on those competitors to shortchange their workers as well.
Election 2020 - don't be afraid of the mail
My feature piece this week was a deep dive into how mail-in voting works. The bottom line: Is it perfect? No. Is it at least as safe as all the other crazy ways we collect and count votes in America? Yes. As we approach election day, it might help to check your registration information — particularly your signature.
Has there been mail-in vote fraud? Yes! But I urge you every time you hear a throwaway line from a politician (or a journalist) like “This one person collected 1,700 ballots,” dig into the details. Always look for the rest of the story. You’ll find these stories quickly fall apart, or at least the scale is a tiny fraction of the ghost story being told. Here’s the Washington Post telling the rest of the story about a story Attorney General William Barr told recently.
Hernandez was hired by others to canvass neighborhoods for mail-in ballots, which he would then turn over to those who hired him for possible alteration. He said that, on a good day, Hernandez might collect 12 ballots. “1,700? Not a prayer in the world,” Anton said.
Unintended consequences of technology
How many times do we have to tell a different version of the movie Minority Report? Here’s some great local journalism from The Tampa Bay Times about yet another snake oil tech project sold to cops that was supposed to stop crime before it started — but ended up hassling people instead.
…It sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.
They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.
One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
For good measure, here’s a Twitter thread about snail oil sold to schools to “ease the burden of grading” on overworked teachers. By automatically grading essays! It namedrops Weapons of Math Destruction, with themes aplenty that we hit on in our book, The Plateau Effect. We have become slaves to things we can count, ignoring all else, with disastrous consequences. And by encouraging gaming the system, we get absurd results.
Finally: Combine unfair automated grading and the department of pre-crime, and you get…proptech! Property Management Technology. Sure, it can be cool to unlock your door with your face. But what if your face predicts you’ll be late with the rent? From BusinessInsider.com
While these scenarios may sound slightly dystopian, more landlords are turning to facial recognition and other forms of property tech, or "proptech," not just to surveil residents, but to keep out "undesirable" ones in the first place, according to researchers who study the intersection of technology and housing.
They said some proptech companies are even marketing their products as a way for landlords to discover who won't be able to make rent during the pandemic.
While the legal landscape is largely uncharted, lawmakers in Congress and in New York City have proposed bills that would ban the use of facial recognition and other biometric data in public housing. Civil rights groups and regulators have also challenged companies like Facebook in court, claiming their algorithms (which impact who sees housing ads) are racially biased.
Happy Labor Day. Take the day off. Tip a gig worker well. And if you want to find out about the real meaning of Labor Day, read this piece at TheConversation.com (Workers had to strike to celebrate the first Labor Day!)