The post Unions and the Gig-Economy: The Case of AirBnB appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Steven Tufts: The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions for workers. Do emerging ‘sharing-economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb mark a significant shift in production and distribution systems? Are they emancipatory or exploitive? How can they be regulated across multiple jurisdictions and multiple platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Homestay, Uber, Lyft)? These and other questions have been raised by those emphasizing the platforms as a growing source of employment for contingent workers and their power to transform waged work into different relationships such as dependent contracts.1 Kim Moody recently offered that these platforms are simply advanced ways for workers to ‘moonlight’ in an age characterized by depressed wage growth and the majority of new employment being in low wage, precarious jobs.2 Despite the success of these services with consumers, there are contradictions for the future of work and implications for organized labour that unions are only starting to address – albeit in contradictory ways.
In mid-July 2016, the interim report on Ontario’s Changing Workplaces Review was released. The 300 plus page report said very little specifically about the gig-economy with the exception of a few sparse mentions on the role technology plays in changing employment relations.3 The Review is interested in how to extend workplace protection to workers using platforms such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb to supplement their incomes.4 Indeed, much of the report focusses on the general challenges of misclassification of workers as contractors.5 Here, the options presented to deal with gig-economy work are to either: maintain the status quo and exclude many of these workers as independent contractors; recognize these workers as ‘dependent contractors’6 (e.g. Uber drivers) and extend employment standards to them; or develop new regulations and standards that are specific to dependent contractors with exemptions for some sectors and workers.
The narrow framing of the options misses some important points. First, regulation of ‘dependent contractors’ in the gig-economy will be subject to exemptions for specific sectors and workers just as other sectors managed to be exempt from the Employment Standards Act (ESA) in the past. Exemptions in the present ESA have been documented, such as the exclusion of a disproportionate numbers of women, young people, and racialized workers in sectors such as agriculture and hospitality.7 Second, there is an ‘enforcement gap’ that persists even when innovative and appropriate standards are established and applied to broad sectors.8If employers in small workplaces cannot be held accountable to the ESA, then how can the state ever enforce standards in a hyper-fissured gig-economy with private platforms organizing thousands of contractors? There are legal challenges to classifications, but the courts are inefficient in finding timely resolutions through litigation over classification and enforcement.9 Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that new platforms continue to erode traditional employment relationships and threaten unionized jobs in existing sectors. Taxi drivers are replaced by Uber drivers and unionized hotel labour is replaced by Airbnb hosts and subcontracted cleaners. The platforms effectively download risk and investment to individuals as personal assets (i.e., cars and homes) are more deeply integrated into processes of accumulation. Workers earning substandard income in precarious employment are trapped in a vicious circle where they are forced to moonlight using Uber or rent out their homes via Airbnb to make ends meet.
At same time, capital is also able to use the platforms to create new types of operations. For example, property owners with multiple housing units can now rent out their properties on a short term basis at a daily rate much higher than longer term rentals with minimal transaction costs. These economic activities, mistakenly all lumped together as ‘home-sharing’, undermine unionized jobs and employment in sectors such as accommodation and have wide ranging impacts on rental housing markets.
While the social costs of Uber were the first to be discussed at length,10 there is also the case of Airbnb and smaller short-term rental platforms. The rapid expansion of the Airbnb platform in Toronto is astounding. There are currently over 12,000 listings for Toronto on the Airbnb platform as the number of listings doubled in 2016 from 2015.11 Airbnb’s recruitment and marketing image as an opportunity for individual ‘hosts’ to share their rooms or their homes to earn money for vacations and holidays is challenged by the data.12 First, a majority of rentals and revenues are ‘entire homes’ not extra room rentals or shared accommodations. Second, over 50 per cent of revenues from Airbnb are generated by ‘multi-unit hosts’. These are professional operations holding multiple units – sometimes in the same condo facility – using the platform to enter the short-term rental accommodation sector.13
The result is the rise of ‘ghost hotels’, buildings or properties in close proximity with one another owned by a single operator renting out multiple units as short-term rentals on platforms such as Airbnb. The impact on the hotel sector is not insignificant. Airbnb has grown from almost nothing in 2010 to over 12,000 listings in the Greater Toronto Area and it is estimated to have already captured over 5% of the market share in Toronto and Vancouver. With over 1,000 rooms booked through Airbnb each night in Toronto, it is the equivalent of Toronto’s Chelsea hotel, the largest hotel in Canada, being rented to almost full capacity. There have been relatively few new net rooms added to the city’s hotel room supply over the last 15 years. Development has largely been restricted to smaller co-developments which include hotels and condos. At the same time, the owners of the Chelsea and other hotels are seeking to convert their properties to condominiums, further removing significant hotel room supply from the market. Conversions not only threaten unionized hotel jobs, but also diminish the city’s capacity to attract and host large conventions and events.
Even more significant than the employment effects is the removal of units from the rental housing stock. The shift of entire units from long term to short rentals has implications for Toronto’s housing supply. Research from David Wachsmuth and colleagues at McGill University has found that Airbnb alone removed 13,700 units from the housings stocks of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.14 The bulk of these listings are in high demand neighbourhoods. The expanding short-term rental units do not pay commercial property taxes (which are double that of residential property taxes) or any special hotel taxes, reducing the municipal revenues that are needed to pay for public housing and tourism promotion.
Other impacts have also been reported in the media. The disruption of Toronto neighbourhoods by ‘party Airbnbs’ where multiple unit hosts operate are a concern.15 Even more disruptive and contentious is the explosion of Airbnb rental units in condominiums, some of which have bylaws prohibiting short-term rentals. In a recent twist, Airbnb is now partnering with condo developments, engaging in one-on-one agreements with condo boards over issues such as security and complaints and agreeing to revenue sharing with the boards themselves.16 This privatized regulation allows the Airbnb platform sole access to condos that might otherwise pass bylaws to restrict ghost-hotels in the property or allow competing platforms to operate. Airbnb is also used by hosts to secure mortgages for homes they might not get financing for without the additional short-term rental revenue stream. It is hardly surprising that Airbnb has even floated the idea of building its own brick and mortar properties.
Airbnb is currently valued at $31-billion and growing rapidly in major urban areas. The company aggressively lobbies municipalities seeking to regulate its operations and does not hesitate to litigate.17Currently, there are multiple battles to regulate short-term rentals and Airbnb as the largest platform. There are a number of issues at play, ranging from restricting short-term rentals to in-home units, forbidding multiple listings by ghost hotel owners, and platform accountability. Unions have engaged with the rise of short-term rental platforms in different ways, with UNITEHERE taking the lead in Canada with the formation of the Fairbnb.ca coalition to fight against Airbnb’s unregulated expansion in Canada’s largest urban markets.
Fairbnb.ca is a coalition founded by UNITEHERE Local 75 in July 2016. The coalition includes some tenants’ rights organizations, neighborhood groups, condo owners’ associations, hotel ownership groups, and sympathetic academics (including the author). It is best described as what Amanda Tattersall and David Reynolds term a ‘support’ coalition.18 Such coalitions are initiated by a union and largely resourced and administered by a single organization with some input from supporters. The coalition can operate at multiple scales, but in this case focuses on municipal bylaws. Fairbnb.ca is organizationally driven by UNITEHERE Local 75 representing 7,000 hospitality workers in Toronto. The coalition is entirely union-financed with in-kind contributions from coalition partners. The motivations for supporters range from primary concerns with lack of affordable housing in the city, to neighbourhood disruption, to the loss of hotel jobs. Further, there is a cross-class component to the coalition with the union partnering with some hotel employers fearing the loss of market share to short-term rentals.
Despite the structural limits of support coalitions, Fairbnb.ca has had significant success in raising the issues related to short-term rentals in Canada’s large cities. It has also been successful in getting municipalities to consider the impacts of short-term rentals seriously and regulate online platforms through municipal bylaws. This has been achieved primarily through media campaigns and lobbying efforts countering the superior communications and lobbying resources of Airbnb. In Toronto, proposed legislation will establish a licensing and registration system and restrict ‘multiple listings’ from a single host. Still contentious is the issue of allowing home owners to list ‘secondary suites’ (self-contained units in homes) which can potentially be used as long-term rentals. There also remains a lack of clarity over how accountable platforms such as Airbnb will be in reporting violations and sharing data with the city.19
Though UNITEHERE has had significant success in engaging Airbnb through its coalition strategy, other unions have chosen a quite different path of engagement with the platform. Unifor in particular has publicly supported Airbnb as ‘progressive’ capital given the company’s support for a higher minimum wage, partnerships with settlement agencies housing refugees, and alleged openness to fair regulation. In a statement submitted to Toronto city council, Unifor President Jerry Dias argues that:
“Airbnb is setting an example for a path forward that couples the potential of the digital economy with the reality of working people across the country, and has demonstrated its willingness to operate in a manner consistent with the goals of broader society. Because of Airbnb’s progressive approach, Unifor is exploring ways to work together with them. We will continue to explore areas of mutual interest to improve the public good, and if possible work toward a national partnership.”20
This ‘partnership’ is indeed politically useful for Airbnb as it conveniently gives the company some progressive legitimacy and provides councillors who wish to side with Airbnb against Fairbnb.ca some political cover. Less clear is what Unifor has to gain through such a social ‘partnership’. In the USA, SEIU did attempt to undermine UNITEHERE with a similar partnership with Airbnb that promised the union access to organizing short-term rental room cleaners. But this deal collapsed after SEIU faced public criticism (and perhaps also recognized how difficult it would be to organize workers in ghost hotels).21 Unifor may be seeking a similar arrangement or even an understanding that would allow the union to represent brick and mortar hotels being planned by Airbnb.22 Here, we see echoes of the union’s controversial strategy to form a partnership with Magna with its ‘Framework for Fairness’ agreement a decade ago.23 Yet short-term rentals employ far less workers than the auto parts sector. In a recent report released by The Hotel Association of Canada, it is estimated that the hotel sector in Canada generates 191,600 full-time equivalent jobs, while Airbnb generates only 1,037.24 At this time, evidence indicates that short-term rentals simply do not generate nearly the same number of jobs as the traditional hotel sector which provides a full range of hospitality services. It is difficult to see how large numbers of new members might be organized through this strategy and whether any partnership with Airbnb will give Unifor any leverage in reaching these precarious workers.
It may be that Unifor’s involvement with Airbnb is more related to recent conflicts among unions. In July 2016, Airbnb made a great deal of fanfare of its hiring of Alex Dagg as its Canadian Policy Lead to head-up its municipal lobbying efforts. Dagg, once heralded as a promising and innovative labour organizer in Toronto was a leader of UNITE when it merged with HERE in the mid-2000s. Following an intense internal fight, the UNITE portion of the UNITEHERE merger left the union to form Workers United and joined SEIU. The relationship between Dagg and what now constitutes UNITEHERE Local 75 might be charitably described as ‘strained’. Dagg soon left SEIU to become Director of Operations for the National Hockey League Players Association. The hiring of Dagg to counter Fairbnb.ca would appear to be more than coincidence and quite strategic on the company’s part. Airbnb in its press release announcing Dagg’s appointment focused – in keeping with its progressive capital image – on Dagg’s career experience ‘championing social justice’ in the union movement.25
Unifor established a presence in the accommodation sector decades ago with its merger with railway workers in the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Transport and General Workers, which also represented the workers employed at the grand railway hotels. UNITEHERE has historically defended itself against raiding from a number of large unions operating in Canada. As part of this experience, it is not unexpected that UNITEHERE endorsed a letter to the CLC from a number of its affiliates harshly criticizing Unifor’s disastrous attempt to take over the Amalgamated Transit Union Local in 2016. In short, the opposing forms of union engagement with Airbnb may be inseparable from patterns of divisive labour movement internal conflicts which the company is trying to exploit to its advantage.
As a support coalition, Fairbnb.ca is not primarily designed to build a movement for affordable housing or broader regulation of the gig-economy. Fairbnb.ca’s success to date as a specific issue public campaign lies with a single organization setting strategic goals and partners deciding how best they can provide support (e.g., joint-lobbying, deputations). Admittedly, it is an effective structure for this type of campaign. In the case of short-term rentals, it can be argued that UNITEHERE’s and Unifor’s strategic choices engaging the gig-economy are also shaped by the persistent sectarianism that continues to plague the labour movement in Canada.
UNITEHERE, a small union relative to large general unions in Canada, is understandably cautious about working closely with other unions given that it has been targeted for raiding in the past. Also important is the fact that Fairbnb.ca is a cross-class coalition that does include hotel employers. While the few employers formally in Fairbnb.ca do not provide anything beyond in-kind support, the inclusion of capital from the outset structures the aims of the coalition in a very specific manner. The decision to not initially build a larger class-based coalition with multiple unions and a more expansive list of community groups limits Fairbnb.ca primarily to a media campaign and lobbying effort.
Unifor’s opposing strategy of embracing cross-class ‘progressive capital’ is as cynical as it is short-sighted. Partnership with Airbnb is unlikely to yield many new members from ‘ghost hotels’ and it remains unclear how Dias will explain partnership with a company undermining traditional hotels to his members working in the sector. Dias will also have to explain to activist members why their union is supporting a multinational firm that is removing thousands of rental units from the housing stock of large cities. While it is difficult to imagine that Unifor has embraced the partnership deal solely in response to a political difference with a smaller union, this cannot be easily dismissed as a partial explanation.
No single union is able to take on such immense and growing sectors of the economy alone. Central labour bodies and local labour councils do not have the capacities (or the affiliate support) to coordinate sectoral responses and strategies, so new formations are needed. In the case of short-term rentals, a local sector council of unions representing hotel workers may be useful. UNITEHERE represents the majority of unionized hotel workers in Toronto, but there are other large and well-resourced unions representing hotel workers in large cities. A common sectoral strategy and approach is what concern for workers in the sector demands. On this front, UNITEHERE has begun the process of re-establishing relations with the CSN fighting against short-term rentals in Quebec. At the same time, Unifor has participated in informal local sector councils such as the Toronto Airport Workers’ Council (TAWC) as it counters efforts to privatize Pearson International Airport.26
New spaces of solidarity such as local sector councils where local unions representing workers in the same sector can talk to each other about common shop-floor issues are important. Further, local united fronts will more effectively confront large gig-economy firms lobbying against progressive municipal regulation – an increasingly important arena of engagement for labour, capital, and the state.27 While unions require an urban strategy, local sector councils do not need to abandon the arenas of provincial or national regulation or fail to engage with the Changing Workplaces Review and its implications for gig-economy work. Successful local sector councils with an urban focus will have a multi-scalar sensibility as all social movements do. Local level formations can, however, address common concerns free from national and international leadership and start to overcome destructive sectarianism. If organized labour fragmented, workers will continue to suffer in – or be displaced from – regressive gig-economy workplaces. •
Steven Tufts is an Associate Professor in Geography at York University.
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]]>Ursula Huws continues the conversation on Universal Basic Income in this article, originally published on Open Democracy’s New Economics section:
More than one in five UK workers, over seven million people, are now in precarious employment according to this analysis of official figures by John Philpott. Since 2006, the numbers on zero-hours contracts has grown by three-quarters of a million are and over 200,000 more are working on temporary contracts. My own recent research has found that some two and a half million adults in the UK may be working for online platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit or Upwork at least once a month, with about 1.2 million people earning more than half their income from this kind of work. A growing proportion of the population is piecing together an income from multiple sources, in many cases making even the concept of a fixed occupation anomalous.
Large numbers of worker do not know, from one day – or even hour – to the next if and when they will next be working. Yet we still have an anachronistic benefit system based on the principle that any fit adult (and, under the current regime, many who are less than fit) must either be ‘in work’ or ‘seeking work’. The old Beveridgean welfare state model is, in short, bust. What is left of the old welfare safety net is fundamentally incompatible with a globalised just-in-time labour market in which workers are increasingly paid by the task.
The victims of these incompatibilities are among the most vulnerable in our society – forced to take any work that is going but often unable to claim benefit when none is available. They are caught between the rock of harsh sanctions regimes and the hard place of capricious and unreliable employers, often with no dependable source of income whatsoever. And the numbers of these people missed by the safety net keep growing. The use of food banks has increased more than forty-fold since 2008, the estimated number of rough sleepers has risen by 55% since 2010 and the number of children in poverty rose from 3.7 million in 2014-2015 to 3.9 million a year later – an increase of 200,000 in just one year. Something is clearly terribly wrong and the increasingly urgent question is how to fix it.
This is part of the problem to which the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) now presents itself as a solution to an expanding range of analysts. UBI is not only promoted as a way to update the benefit system to bring it into line with new labour market realities. It is also seen as a way to reward carers and others who carry out unpaid reproduction work in the home, to support artists, enable lifelong learning or give more autonomy to disabled people. This once-marginal idea is now seriously espoused in the UK by the Green Party, the Scottish Nationalist Party, some trade unions and sections of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties and Plaid Cymru. Further afield is also actively promoted (including setting up experimental schemes) in Finland, the Netherlands, India, South Africa and, at the neoliberal end of the spectrum, by high-tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
At the headline level, indeed, UBI can seem to represent some sort of magic bullet that will solve all these problems simultaneously, and is often promoted as such. But a closer examination of the various models proposed reveals considerable differences between them. If these are not recognised, attempts to operationalise it could lead at best to risks of unintended consequences and at worst deep political fissures that could even exacerbate some of the problems UBI is intended to address. Most attempts to model how UBI could be implemented in practice in the UK (for example by Howard Reed and Stewart Lansley, Malcolm Torry and Gareth Morgan) have looked at it in what might be called a policy-neutral context, in which all other features of the economy and the tax system remain unaltered. But of course the reality is that any change in government policy that could lead to the introduction of UBI would be part of a much broader political upheaval that would transform many of these other features. Abstracting UBI from its broader setter in this way makes it harder to see such potential hazards.
For people who believe that the world’s sixth largest economy should be able to protect its citizens from penury, and are committed to (re)developing a welfare state that reduces social inequality and enhances choice and opportunity for its citizens, perhaps the time has now come for a serious debate, not just about the pros and cons of UBI in the abstract, but about which other policies it should be linked with to ensure that these objectives are met. This involves grappling with some difficult questions. Here I look at four of the risks that could arise if a UBI is introduced without such policy safeguards.
In the abstract, the relationship between a UBI and wage levels can be argued to be either positive or negative. Some argue, quite plausibly, that a guaranteed minimum income would enable people to be much choosier about which jobs they accept, giving them options to turn down really exploitative wage rates and perhaps even providing them with the equivalent of strike pay to enable them to negotiate more effectively with employers without their dependents suffering.
An alternative view draws on the experience of tax credits (and now, universal credit) to point out that providing an income top-up is, in effect, a subsidy to employers who pay below-subsistence wages. In 2015-2016, this subsidy was estimated at about £30 billion. Had this been paid out by employers as part of their wage bill then this would also have led to an increase in national insurance and tax revenues. These credits therefore represent a factor which, whether inadvertently or not, increase inequalities between those who rely on their wages for their livelihood and those who derive their incomes, directly or indirectly, from corporate profits.
If a UBI is not to exacerbate this state of affairs, it is imperative that it is linked to a high minimum wage and one, moreover, that can be linked to systems where workers are paid by the task, not just to hourly rates.
An important argument against UBI comes from social democratic parties and trade unions, especially in parts of continental Europe with a strong tradition of sector-level bargaining, who argue that its introduction would undermine their efforts to make employers pay into schemes that provide negotiated benefits, such as pensions, health insurance or childcare. A UBI provided by the state would, they contend, shift the burden of paying for it from employers to the general taxpayer. As Richard Murphy has shown, ‘the poorest 20% of households in the UK have both the highest overall tax burden of any quintile and the highest VAT burden’. This shift would therefore exacerbate inequalities, rather than reducing them, at a societal level.
To avoid this risk, it is therefore important that the introduction of UBI should be accompanied by measures that support trade unions’ abilities to bargain with employers at company and sector levels for benefits for their members, by protection for existing company pensions schemes and by other measures that ensure that employers continue to contribute their share of the cost, for instance through employers’ contributions to National Insurance.
By giving everyone cash, neoliberal models of UBI play along with the grain of an increasingly marketised economy in which services are individually purchased from private providers. There is therefore a risk that UBI could become a sort of glorified voucher system, undermining collectively provided public services that are designed by bodies democratically answerable to the communities they serve, under the guise of offering individual choice. Quite apart from the considerable risks that this poses to democracy, social cohesion and the quality of services, this could disadvantage individuals with special needs who require more expensive and/or specialised services than the average, exacerbating inequalities even while purporting to offer everybody the same.
It is therefore imperative that the introduction of a UBI should be embedded with policies that protect the scope and quality of public services and their collective and universal character.
If a UBI is defined as a right of citizenship, then this raises the question of entitlement: who is, or is not, a citizen? And on what basis is their right to UBI established? A final serious risk associated with the introduction of UBI is that it could become linked to a narrow definition of citizenship from which some people (for example refugees, asylum-seekers or residents who do not hold UK passports) are excluded. In addition to the support this could give to racism and xenophobia this could also lead to a two-tier labour market in which people who are not entitled to UBI become an exploited underclass.
The introduction of UBI must therefore be integrated with humane and well-thought-out policies on immigration and citizenship, perhaps by linking entitlement to the place of residence, rather than nationality.
I have highlighted here what I see as four major challenges that need to be confronted if UBI is to be introduced as a genuinely progressive initiative that can restore some dignity and security to the most vulnerable members of our society, enable a flexible labour market to function in ways that avoid exploitation while encouraging entrepreneurship and creativity and reduce social inequality. In doing so, I do not wish to pour cold water on the very idea. On the contrary, I think that, at this moment in history, it is crucially important – so important that what is needed now is a debate, not about the abstract idea of a UBI, but about how it could be introduced in the real world in a way that is genuinely compatible with social-democratic and feminist ideals and starts to rebuild the train-wreck that is currently all we have left of the 20th century welfare state that so many people worked so hard to create.
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