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Welcome to Radical A.I., a podcast about radical ideas, radical people and radical stories at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence.

We are your hosts, Dylan and Jess.

In this episode, we interviewed Dr. Viña Double a professor of law at UC Hastings. Viña received her JD and PhD from UC Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. Vinas research focuses on the intersection of law, technology and precarious work. She uses empirical methodologies and critical theory to examine the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on the lives of workers, the constitutive influences of law and work on identity and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.

In this interview, some of the topics that we cover include what is precarious work and how does it impact the psychology of labor? How might platforms like Uber and Lyft be negatively impacting their workers? How to gig economy apps control the lives of those who use them for work. How do we regulate the gig economy in a way that empowers workers? And finally, what is techno utopianism and how does it influence capitalism and colonialism?

It was our pleasure to interview Viña for this episode, especially as she finds herself at the forefront and in the center of so many of these issues that are being fought and engaged with legally right now as we're releasing this episode. And so we're so grateful for Viña taking the time to be with us.

And also, we learned so much about how these issues and how precarious work are impacting people all over the globe, but also locally as well.

And without further ado, we are so excited to share this interview with Viña double with all of you.

It is our pleasure to welcome today Viña Duval to the podcast, how are you doing today?

Been a great thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. And as we get started and dive into this interview, I was wondering if I could just start with a little bit of your story and what motivates you to do the work that you do.

Yeah. So I guess I you know, I'm the child of immigrants and and I sort of have an atypical family.

And so much as my my mom was the breadwinner and my my dad stayed at home and and largely because he was pushed out of the labor market, not because he wanted to be a stay at home dad. And I really have seen in my in my life, both in my my my immediate family and my extended family, really a lot of of, you know, economic suffering.

And I have always been interested in the ways in which immigrants in the United States, you know, either thrive or or not as a result of laws and policies and firm decisions. And so, you know, I guess what what I'm the project that I that I've been working on for the last decade is is really focused on the production of precarious work through technology.

But what what got me to arrive there was it was really a not a non technologically sort of informed question around around precarious work.

An immigrant worker experiences, particularly male worker experiences, around precarious work.

Could you explain for folks who haven't heard the term precarious work before what you mean by that?

Yeah, so in general, I would say that for most of the 20th century, for a good, you know, 50 to 60 years in the 20th century, particularly in the post-war period, we had what we what we think of as secure work.

You had people who were working mostly full time jobs whose hours were were stable and secure, whose income was stable and secure. And and as a result, who who's particularly I mean, white men in particular, but whose whose lives as a result were or more or less predictable. And sociologists are now more increasingly other people in other disciplines as well, have started to over the last 10 years, talk about the way that people experience uncertainty in their lives, particularly economic uncertainty as precarity and so precarious work is work that is that is unstable, unpredictable, uncertain.

And there's a whole sort of there's a hole across disciplines from public health to education.

There's a whole lot of discussion of the implications of that kind of uncertain work, what it does to people psychologically, what it does, what it does to people's families, what it does to them individually and and also socially and and the sort of origins of precarious work.

I think people look at not just firms, the sources of precarious work, but also entire social and economic systems, including, you know, everything from education to to firm policy.

So you mentioned that you went from just working with precarious work to how technology influences this precarious work. And I'm wondering if there's a specific memory, experience or project that made you turn towards technology in the space.

Yeah, it's a really good question.

So I guess I can tell the story in two ways and they both kind of collide in a particular moment. So my my family in India, my dad, my dad's side of the family is from a small village in in the westernmost part of the state of Gujarat than they were they were craft craftspeople.

They were artisans. They for generations made saris. And until the 1970s, they made saris. And particularly they did these designs in the series called Bomani. And this is a type of tie dye. They did this tie dye using using fabrics, Apsara, not fabrics, using dyes that were made from, you know, botanical natural sources. And in the 1970s, it became sort of the fad to use, not the dyes that they had been using for generations, but to use German imported chemicals to to dye the saris. And the result of that, this ended up being that many people died of cancer, including my my grandfather ended up.

Dying of what I thought or what I think is an is an occupational hazard as a result of the chemicals he died of of leukemia, and it's you know, at some point in my life, I think probably in college, I started to think about this as as a story about technology, colonialism or post colonialism, the developing world or the global south, and and the ways that that workers or individual people's lives were sort of impacted and their story is not being told, you know, like literally this sort of.

Quote unquote, technological advancements this way that that the country in the post-colonial moment was thinking about what it meant to catch up with the rest of the world resulted in a kind of development.

And I don't I don't mean to say development and normative sense, which isn't a descriptive sense, a kind of development that was really, you know, really painful and and actually, you know, that killed people.

I have real, really negative impacts on people's lives. And so just sort of gave me that critical, critical framework in thinking about technology more broadly.

And my family situation and my my interest in precarious labor ultimately led me into studying the taxi industry. This became a really sort of interesting space for me, in part because it was kind of it was a very common place for people, particularly immigrant men from my community who were pushed out of the labor market to find work. And it was also work that they embraced because it allowed them to take care of their their parents and their families and do these sorts of, you know, have some scheduling autonomy in their lives. And it was also, interestingly, a place of real camaraderie. You know, again, men who are otherwise emasculated in the mainstream economy really found friendship in and waiting in the airport lines in and LaGuardia or at SFO or the San Jose airport. And and it was a place where they created community and kind of found a found little pieces of home and identity. And so I studied the taxi industry. I represented taxi workers when I was a lawyer.

In addition to in addition to having a Ph.D., I practiced law for about five years and I represented taxi workers. And I decided to write my dissertation on on the taxi workers that I had had sort of worked with when I was when I was practicing.

And as soon as I filed my dissertation, Uber and Lyft hit the streets of San Francisco. And my first response to this phenomenon, which was a larger phenomenon that I was experiencing all around me, you know, I had lived in the Bay Area and went to Stanford, then went to Berkeley for law school and graduate school and lived in the Bay Area for, you know, at this this point over 10 years, my entire adult life. And I was seeing this rapid transformation of an urban space around me in San Francisco where I was. It went from a city that was really sort of idiosyncratic and sort of beloved for its art scene and and its sort of hippie vibe and alternative cultures to a to a very technologically for technology firm oriented space. That was as a result of decisions made by by different mayors who sort of invited in these firms and gave them tax breaks and created spaces for them on Market Street and really gentrified and changed the city. And so as I was finishing up my dissertation, all of this was happening.

And and Uber and Lyft, I started to hear from taxi drivers that there are these bandit tech cabs who are picking up picking up riders and they're in their own personal vehicles and cutting in line at the hotels. And and I really at first just ignored it.

I just I thought to myself, this is going to go away. This is some, like, silly tech startup. And and it's so dangerous. Like, who's going to get into someone else's car when that person isn't a regulated taxi driver, it seems seems so crazy. Of course, the state is going to come down and make these people go out of business. And and so I you know, I ignored it for for a while. And the taxi drivers who I organized with would just got more and more and more agitated and more and more angry.

And they did really, really amazing things to organize against against the the Uber and Lyft and Sidecar at the time, as they started to grow, they the the Uber, Lyft and Sidecar drivers were all driving without commercial insurance. So if they got into an accident, they would have the drivers would have had to bear all of the of the costs of the accident. And there would have been no way to cover the cover. The the people, the consumers, the riders who got who are who are injured in the accident. And so they were collecting license plates and reporting them to the insurance companies. And then they were writing these really beautiful, beautiful legal briefs to the state of California for why they should not allow these companies to operate in the way that they were operating.

And and, you know, I still kind of continue to be like, OK, this is going to go away. It's going to go away. And then in 2013.

The state of California created a whole new set of rules for this company, for these companies, and it really opened my eyes, I think, to the first time I started to see the way that well financed firms, tech firms in California will finance tech firms are operating by creating legal systems that that no one else had to abide by, but that that worked for them and their business models.

And there were so many. And, you know, again, it seemed like nuts to me and seemed like, how could this possibly happen? This wasn't good for consumers. This wasn't good for the environment. This wasn't good for workers. Like, why was this why was this allowed to unfold in this way? And then it went from like, you know, after the state of California created regulations and called them transfer, gave them a name transportation network companies. Then we saw this kind of work proliferate not just all over the United States, but all over the world and not just in the uber economy. But then we had the the food delivery economy in Europe and and China in particular. And, you know, there for a while it was there were a few years and a few, maybe five years ago there. The joke was the uber of like, you know, what are you going to be the uber of of housecleaning, the uber of dry cleaning, you know, like and there were all these startups that and really like that. Was this sort of a really annoying fascination around technology here and this idea that, you know, that there were these were technological advancements, that these were advancements that were going to push us to to, you know, a new stage in civilization where people didn't have to work and consumers got what they needed, you know, at the drop of a hat.

And and it seems like no one was really understanding that there were an entire economy of low wage workers who, because of the way the companies treated them, were were completely carved out of all labor and employment laws all over the world who were sustaining the system.

And the technology's application to the system was not not bringing you efficiency. It wasn't that, you know, you got your you got your taxes super fast because the app was connecting. You suit very quickly to a worker. It was that there was an oversupply of workers driving around the city because anyone could download this app. And we were in a moment of high unemployment. And and so, you know, you're the the the convenience of the customer was really at the at the to the detriment of the people conducting the labor and creating value for for the company. Isn't it just it was all of a sudden, you know, for a long time I resisted studying, studying this this world. And I sort of said, well, this is the same thing as the taxi company is just more exploitative. And I over time, I started to embrace that while they were doing the same work. What was happening was actually quite different in terms of how workers experience their work, in terms of of how the state viewed the economy and how they were regulating it and in terms of what the firms got away with precisely because they were viewed as technology firms.

I want to say on this worker psychology element, especially in precarious work. So your story of your family in Gujarat resonated with me. I spent a few months in Gujarat back in 2011 and did a fair amount of research on the rapid industrialisation of the golden corridor and all of that, and especially interviewing folks from indigenous communities who had very suddenly their entire lives had shifted or their agricultural land had suddenly been dammed up for miles and miles and miles. And there's I feel like there is a level of parallel from that to like this rapid introduction of this gig economy and the shift in this technology space. And I'm wondering from that. That's like I'm thinking of a specific story where someone's identity. Right. Had really been shifted about what their role was in the world because their work had had to change. They had to go work in a factory where they had been farming for years. And I'm wondering, like especially in the question of masculinity, but maybe in general, how would you describe the psychology of working in a precarious work environment?

Yeah, I mean, I just want to say first that it's like so insightful. And I hesitated to even share the story about my family, even though I think about it all the time in the context of this work, because it's really hard for me to draw distinct parallels to tell you what, why they're so similar. And yet I feel in my body that. You know that when I talk to workers in this economy, especially workers who used to be taxi drivers, that there is something very similar to what I've what I've seen in terms of the the application of quote unquote, technologies for advancement in my own, what is viewed as advancement in my own family.

And so, you know, I continue to spend a lot of time, especially with taxi workers, both taxi workers who continue to drive as taxi workers because they've made financial investments to do so. And then also taxi workers who have turned into Uber drivers. And, you know, both of these groups of drivers are independent contractors like they both of them are are are carved out of traditional labor and employment law protections.

But the difference in the taxi economy was that they the drivers were working within a regulated space where there was control over supply.

Only a certain number of taxis were on the street at any given moment, and fares were more predictable because state regulated fares. And so even though a taxi driver was in San Francisco, wasn't an employee, he could say, OK, I'm going to work 10 hours a day. I'm probably going to make three hundred and fifty dollars. So there was that predictability to the income with Uber and Lyft. There has been zero predictability. So a driver can can drive for one week and make eight hundred dollars and then a month later drive and drive the same amount of time and the same amount of place and make two hundred dollars. And in fact drivers, the full time drivers who conduct the vast majority of work on the platform. They say that over the last three or four years their incomes have gone down, their yearly incomes have gone down by about 60 percent, which is something that they could never have predicted.

But in addition to that, there's something again, this is about the technological application of of app based based services onto the economy, which I think really, really does have to do with technology.

And not and not just the business model, because these workers are matched via via an app.

They don't have the kind of ability to develop a clientele.

They don't have control over where they go in the city in the sense that the the algorithms sort of nudge them to go in particular places. So in the taxi economy, I when I when I wrote about the way taxi drivers talked about their work, particularly men, they talked about it as though they were hunting like they sort of had this this idea that they were truly small businessmen because they were kind of, you know, using their charm and their and their know how and their knowledge of the streets to build a clientele. And and then they were they were picking up fares. You know, they were like going through different parts of the city to pick up fares. And then when they wanted to stop doing that, they would go to the airport and hang out their friends while they awaited a ride. And there was, you know, they would like shoot the shit and and play games. And, you know, and it was there was some there was some joy to their work. There was a lot of a lot of camaraderie. And what I see as being very different in and in the uber economy is drivers no longer describe their work through the sort of masculine joy of hunting, but instead really which we can problematize, but instead really talk about it through through a feeling of addiction, like they feel like they are psychologically addicted to the app in the sense that every time they they feel a ping, they sort of like that. You know, you get that sort of psychological rush that you're about to get some money. And part of why and my and my book manuscript, part of why I'm talking what I talk about is part of the reason that they feel this this sort of addiction is because it is such a gamble.

There's so much uncertainty around where they're going to have to where the where the app is going to tell them to drive, where they how much money they're going to make, what kinds of fares they get there. It's like they literally have no control and they can't get out of their cars. Right. Like there are now holding lots and in a lot of the airports. But because there are so many of them, there's the most of the airport authorities, don't let them get out of their cars to sort of hang out. And anyway, they're all so desperate to work because there's such little money that they can't afford to hang out. And so all of the sort of aspects of the work that gave them identity, that sort of allowed them to feel some degree of of a freedom of feeling of of independence. The feeling of like they were really applying a skill or an acumen to their work has completely has completely gone and.

And so, like, you know, when you talk to drivers now, particularly drivers who have done this for, you know, more than six months, the full time drivers that I organized with, I mean, they do it because they have to.

But if there was another way, they wouldn't be doing this work anymore.

There's not the same sense of of of professional identity around it.

So it sounds like in a sense, you're saying this addiction that these gig economy drivers are experiencing is almost like a sense of powerlessness as well. And I'm wondering if we're thinking of ways to approach solutions to this problem. We've had folks on the show who are engineers who might approach this solution space algorithmically. We've had people who are designers or high up at large tech companies, and maybe they would approach it with design decisions. And you're situated in law and policy. And so I'm wondering how you would approach this problem from that perspective.

Yeah, I mean, so I think that this industry has to be has to be regulated such that workers are given a guaranteed minimum wage or a wage floor, that that wage floor is tied to time so that there is some predictability. Once you once you go to when to turn on your app, once you go to work, you can say, OK, I'm going to work X number of hours.

But even if I don't get the number of fares that I want, I still have some wage floors. I'm not going to lose money so that there's some feeling of control there. You know, one of the perverse things about the American legal system, one of these is that if a worker is considered an independent contractor, they risk when they organize together, they risk or they unionize together, they risk violating antitrust laws. So you're essentially colluding if you're if you're two independent contractors or three hundred thousand independent contractors working together to better your working conditions. And so the perverse nature of of Uber is, you know, maintaining that these drivers are independent contractors is that unions have been very reticent to organize in this arena for fear of for fear of violating antitrust laws and incurring that sort of financial liability.

And so, you know, in addition to a basic wage floor, in addition to the basic protections, workers compensation, unemployment insurance that all workers really should have, I think, you know, from a law and policy perspective, these drivers absolutely need the right to to collectively organize and collectively bargain with their employers to raise and have some control over their working conditions. You know, and traditionally, we think of working conditions as wages. Can you know, what's safe and what's you know, like if there was a union right now, drivers would probably bargain to make sure that there was they got PPY.

Right now, Lyft is trying to sell drivers PPY in the middle of a pandemic as opposed to just providing, you know, hand sanitizer.

Yeah, so but so, you know, I think that there are and we're we're we're sort of getting there.

I think the pandemic that we're currently in has really opened the eyes of regulators who have just who decided over the past eight years that it wasn't worth venturing into this economy to kind of try and try and force these companies to abide by the same laws and regulations that even Wal-Mart and McDonald's abide by. And and so in the last just a month and a half, you've seen two attorney generals, both in California and in Massachusetts, say that Uber and Lyft are misclassifying their workers, that they are employees and that they need to be treated as employees. So I'm I'm really quite hopeful about that. And I actually think that that recognition, when and if these companies are forced to sort of to provide a wage floor to these workers.

And, you know, that to me is the central point here is the wage for that's tied to it to time that that will actually shift all of the engineering and design decisions. So, so much right now of how this app is engineered.

So much of even like the graphic design that goes into the app as the drivers experience it is informed by behavioral psychology because the companies really want to exert a high degree of control without looking like those are getting a high degree of control without looking like they're an employer.

So instead of just paying everyone a wage for what they've done is you hired hundreds of social scientists to to help them think about how to shift driver behavior through algorithms and and through design, through visual design of what the drivers experience and if if if they have to fundamentally shift their their own orientation to the workers, if they have to legally own that they are employers, that kind of goes away like there's no.

We need to to push everyone in one direction or or use income targeting to get people to work longer and harder. You just you know, you you have a workforce that's available to you when they can be available to you. And those drivers know they they are going to be controlled. And you are the company can more, more clearly exert that control.

And so I really I think that that that solution is which is, I think, only a half solution to a full solution, which is actually full unionization.

But the solution to to achieve some kind of hourly wage floor is is critical to to everything and will shape everything.

So sometimes in our conversations with guests, we talk about ethics. Right, because that's what the podcast is about. And we talk about technology, ethics, and this question of intentionality comes up. So are these companies. In your expert opinion, is there an intentionality to bringing in unethical systems essentially, or to what degree can we put responsibility on the systems that maybe the capitalist systems that they're operating in? And to what degree can we put on personal responsibility to the designers who are designing these apps?

I think the responsibility lies in both of those both of those places. I generally tend to think of that we need to change structures.

And, you know, oftentimes individuals don't have as much autonomy in making decisions as we as we like to think that they have. And that and that trying to force an engineer within Uber to push back against the company's entire business model and making the decisions that he or she or they might make. And and and, you know, engineering a particular algorithm that controls a driver, that that's sort of it would be great. But we're not we're not likely to to actually control or cannot expect that kind of control that so much of this is structural. That said, I think that the that part of the problem here is that these companies.

There are at least the people that work for these companies and many of the people that work for these companies have come out of the Obama administration, not on the engineering side, but definitely on the government side and the public policy side and the PR side. These people have really convinced themselves that Uber is a solution to advanced capitalism as opposed to a problem created by advanced capitalism. So the argument that that they make is, well, you know, the economy is so bad, wages are so stagnant. This is a way for people to supplement their income, to sort of have some control over their lives. And we know that while that might be the case in some instances, the vast majority of the work that is conducted on the on the platform for the platform is conducted by workers who do it full time, and that even when workers who are casually, they are often making less than the minimum wage, which is unacceptable, incurring all the business expenses and risk that that companies normally should should incur and and are are.

In a situation where they need full time work, so the idea that creating more insecure work somehow is a solution for the problem of insecurity, I think is is is a bad one.

And and so if I were to, you know, it would I have long wanted to sort of talk to engineers at Uber to think to talk to them about how they they conceptualize the work that they're doing and the company that they're working for. I think it would be so interesting to think, to think, to see through their eyes the implications of the work that they're doing. I have I'm so notorious now that I I cannot do a project like that. No one would ever talk to me.

But but it's it's something that I that I have intellectual interest in. But I really firmly believe that putting the onus on them to do things differently is sort of in some ways a fool's errand that they you know, they're caught in this larger cultural and economic system, not just advanced capitalism, but also the specific culture of Silicon Valley that in which they sort of understand everything they're doing through the lens of techno utopianism.

You know, they are creating tools to to make things faster and easier and better for workers and consumers. And who can who can complain about that?

Could you say more about techno utopianism? I don't even know if I said the right. I'm going to say it again, techno utopianism and how that relates to questions of globalization and this advanced capitalism that you're talking about.

Yes, yes. Yeah, sure, I'll just I'll just talk about it's just right, my, my my political theory book for you right now.

Yeah.

I mean, so techno utopianism, as you know, as your listeners know, is this idea that technology can can advance, you know, create quote unquote, advancements in society and bring us closer to a place where people are equal or where everyone has food, where everyone has their needs, needs met and, you know, bring us to to a desirable a desirable place.

And I think it's pretty clear that that is, you know, for you and I that's it's pretty clear that that is not a reality and that that's very much embedded in a set of a set of assumptions.

All of you know, from from who is doing work, you know, like technology, even A.I. technology. The most labor intensive part of A.I. technology is conducted by precarious workers in the global south who are doing all the cleaning, labeling, collecting data and also the assumptions around around, you know, what is good, I think, ah, ah, there's a lot to problematize. And in the context of of globalization and colonialism, I think there is a connection to be made a very a very, very strong connection, actually.

We can talk about Western feminism in the same breath.

But this idea that, you know, the West and the West's ideas around technology are are superior and and tied to civilization.

And we we have to make sure that the rest of the world, you know.

Gets it and and helps us work towards this towards this techno utopian place where where, you know, everything is every day, there are lots of there are lots of firms and companies that are producing products that we all buy that that gosh, I know I'm like babbling on and on is probably going to be a part that you going to cut out.

But let's go back to technology and development.

So, you know, technology has always been used in in the context of colonialism, even as colonialism became the project of quote unquote, development as a sort of rallying cry for why we need to go into these places to advance society, to quote unquote, advance societies.

And oftentimes, actually always that was intertwined with a particular idea of what capitalism should look like, particularly in relationship to to the socialist states in which in the post and the post-colonial period in the development, what we see as a developed, quote unquote, development period, where what we saw as states sort of trying to imagine different kinds of realities and different kinds of civilizations, different kinds of spaces where were advancement wasn't so clearly, you know, you think about this in the Gandhian context where, you know, we were trying to draw to make our own make our own cotton and and keep our own language.

And this was about going back to the going back to weaving our own our own cloth, as opposed to embracing the mills of that were forced upon the Indian laborers by the British and the project of technology. In that sense, as always, I think really been intertwined with with a project of of of colonialism and imperialism and and in terms of how shaped how we conceptualize people and and cultures and states in the global south.

One thing I appreciated about our conversation so far is that we've gone from the global to the local to the global to the local, which I think is how these conversations almost need to be had with that context. And I'm wondering if you go back to the local. So we are recording this on July 17th, 2020, just to date it. And I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about your own locality in California and what is happening right now in relationship to these topics.

Yeah, so and I should say just very briefly that I think part of why we went from the local to the global and from the present to the to the past just now to our conversation, is because I think that so much of what I have researched and the kind of organizing that I've done in my life as a product of who I am, and I very much am a post-colonial subject who is who has seen and experienced the global south in a in a very particular moment, and then also experienced and seen migration in a very particular moment and and everything that I even like in my research today and all of that sort of. Feels very, very relevant to the lives of the people that that the precarious workers who organize and study alongside. So let me tell you a little bit about what's happening today in California.

So we are in a pandemic and we have, you know, upwards of 400 to five hundred thousand workers in California who have been driving for Uber and Lyft, many of whom also drive on other for other companies, but also have been driving for Uber and Lyft.

Those drivers, some of them have gotten the coronavirus and some of them have died. Some I organized with this group, Ride Share Drivers United, and we've had at least a few members die as a result of their exposure to the coronavirus. Some of those drivers continue to work.

Drivers who have been who during the lockdown, many of them, many of them were able to stop working because they had other forms of support or they were able to go get, you know, get go on SNOP, get food benefits. But many of them continued to work because they were unable to procure unemployment insurance because the companies had refused to pay into unemployment insurance for the last eight years.

And those drivers, the ones that had to continue to work as essential workers, have have fallen ill and some of them have have died as a direct result of this of this really irresponsible business model.

And so in recognition of this reality, the state of California, about three or four weeks into the lockdown, decided to sue the the companies, Uber and Lyft, after, you know, I mean, they have been violating the law for eight, eight years. But for the first time, they stood up and said, OK, you know, we're in a really bad situation here. These workers are in a really bad situation. There's nothing about these these that these apps that mean that mean that they that they can't follow basic labor and employment laws. And so we're going to enforce the law against the companies. And so they held a really big press conference and they sued in the middle of the suit. The companies also qualified their ballot initiative. So they have put a ballot initiative on the November ballot.

It's Proposition 22 where they are essentially codifying precarity.

They are saying we will agree to only pay drivers when they are engaged, when there is a rider in the car, and we will give them substandard compensation work, workers compensation for when again, only when there's someone in the car and they're injured and and a very small number of drivers can get, again, some for some sort of substandard health insurance. And they it's like the most anti-democratic proposition I've ever seen.

They make they've made it so that seven eighths of the California legislature has to agree in order to amend any portion of the law if it is passed. And so we're we're at this like, really crazy crossroads where on the one hand, the state is finally seen passed sort of the shiny app and and is looking into the eyes of the workers who are dying as a result of the irresponsible models that these companies have adhered to.

And then, on the other hand, you have companies that are well financed, which, by the way, have not ever turned a profit in eight years, that are using all of their money to put to by law to literally to by law, they put one hundred and ten dollars million. They're selling workers PPY, but they've put one hundred and ten million dollars on into this ballot initiative. And and they're doing everything they can do to to get it passed.

It would it would it would be a devastating result. And what I'm worried about is that it would be the beginning of normalizing this kind of standard, substandard labor conditions across the industry.

So app work makes up a very small percentage of the work done in the United States, less than one percent of the work done in the United States. But what it represents is, is the potential of many industries to become appleford.

To which which.

Would the problem, again, would not be the app business model applied through the app, so the potential for for workers to all become independent contractors and bare the traditional risks of a business.

And so we're at a really kind of things could go two ways in the coming months. And one way would be really good to grow secure, stable work. And the other one would be a devastating blow to the labor movement and to workers lives. And it would be something that would be very hard to shake off.

So thinking even further than just two months in the future, let's say maybe five, 10, 20 years in the future, based off of what you've experience with your research in this space. What do you see as maybe two sides here? What do you see as the likely future for the gig economy and for people who do things like driving for Uber and Lyft? And what do you see or hope maybe as much better envisioned future, unless maybe they're the same, which would be great to I have to be optimistic.

Otherwise, I couldn't continue to do the kind of organizing work I do with with these drivers. And so and frankly, they make me optimistic. I have never I have done a lot of work organizing in my life, and I've never seen the kind of radical self organizing that I've seen in this industry ever anywhere. You know, they are these are workers who work really long hours who who have banded together.

Again, this is Ritcher drivers united in California who have really banded together and and envisioned the kind of work they want to be a part of their lives and are forming one on one relationships with other people in their workforce to grow, to grow with growing what they call an undocumented union, you know, because they they don't have status under the National Labor Relations Act.

And I have never met a smarter, more more thoughtful and articulate, passionate and effective group of people as as as the as the particular group of people that I that I'm that I'm working with the drivers that I'm working with right now.

And so my answer is really that that what I what I see in the future, I think is I'm very hopeful we will be able to attain. I think most likely we would we would stay within the firm model.

I would I would like to see as a cooperative model where you have drivers owning and making decisions around around these issues. But I think what we're most likely to see is that moving forward, the traditional fur model where you have an employer and then you have full time employees who work in this economy. And I think we'll probably continue to call it the gig economy, but it's no longer going to be about gigs. I think workers are going to have predictable schedules and predictable incomes. I think the frontier of of where we're going next is actually thinking about data and this economy and who owns the data, how is the data being leveraged and used and and what kind of data is being collected? So one of the things that the workers in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom, have been much more much better at organizing around is is data ownership because of the GDP they have been able to sue to at least try to get ahead to get more information on the kinds of data companies are collecting through them.

There's a decision on the matter that's going to be made in the next few months. And so we'll see how that pans out. But the United States drivers are always talking to me about how, you know, how the data they collect benefits the companies, and yet they don't even know what their bodies and what their labor is being used to produce and collect.

And it's just that they haven't gotten it seems like they're just really trying for the effort to get a wage floor and they haven't sort of gotten a chance to organize around that.

But I think that's once there's a full time workforce, once there's a union, I think that that's going to be an issue that that workers and the next two, three to five years are going to are going to be in a position to negotiate over.

So we know that you listen to the show before. So you probably know the question that's coming. But as the radical podcast and part of our project is to help define through all of these different disciplines and backgrounds this nebulous concept of radicality or what it means to be radical. And so we're curious from where you're seated a lot in this gig economy and precarious work, how you think about the concept of radical and if or whether or how you situate your own work within that concept?

I think of of radical as changing or transforming the way that we think about our social world and the way that our social world functions, such that we prioritize the lives and the needs of the most vulnerable and the historically marginalized and oppressed.

And so in that sense, I think my work is is very radical.

I think it's easy when you do work in and labor law to think of to think of yourself as radical. But I think that one thing that's often missing from the field of of labour law and labour sociology and more broadly is.

Is thinking about about worker agency in the context of shifting political economies, and that's something I think that's necessary to to maintain a radical methodology and research is to constantly center the most vulnerable, the most marginalized, the most oppressed.

But I think it's also really important for me, for my research to always have some impact. I'm not writing for myself and I'm not writing for sociologists. I'm not writing for for lost scholars. I'm really I'm really writing for the people that I work with and the people that I work alongside and the people that I stand all along alongside, the workers and the drivers themselves. And so for me, that's what that's why I think of my work is as radical. And and I think I think in California, I like I've been really lucky. It's really rare, too, for a scholar to see in their lifetime to see that their work has had any kind of impact. And I've been I've been really lucky in the last last few years to be able to witness it.

So for the drivers of.

Companies like Uber and Lyft and other ride share companies are just maybe people who are working in the gig economy in general who might be feeling that sense of addiction or powerlessness that we were talking about before. Do you have any advice for them to maybe help them reclaim a little bit of agency in their work?

Yes, build a movement, meet with your driver friends and build relationships one on one. Relationships, personal relationships, shared stories of trouble at work. Those are the the building blocks of of a movement of workers. And that is, I think, why the workers and ritcher drivers united that I that I'm that witness and study. I think that's why they're so passionate is because this is the only agency that they've had in their lives and they find it. So it's the camaraderie and the and the connection that they get from from the relationships they've built with other drivers is so meaningful because so much has been taken from them.

And so that's you know, that's my my little my little token of advice.

And Viña, as we come to the end of this interview, if folks want to find out more about you and your research, how would they get in contact with you?

Well, I've been meaning to make a website that hasn't happened.

So so you can always email me Duvall we at Hastings Dot Edu. And also I have an SSRI and where you can sort of look at some of the things I've been publishing.

Elvina, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate the conversation.

Thank you for having me. Was so fun.

Again, we are so grateful that Viña was able to join us for this wonderful conversation, and it stirred up a lot, I think, in me about this question of identity in these socio technical systems that we're creating, whether those are apps or whether they're just programs or whether there are other ways that machine learning is impacting our our lives. But people are doing these things and creating these things. And whenever we're doing and creating as humans where it's feeding back into us, into our identity, into who we are.

And so for me, I was thinking a lot, especially about this question of masculinity that Viña was bringing up in terms of identity and what's at stake in this move from a more classical or traditional taxi system to Uber and Lyft and how folks feel like they're losing their agency, and especially in this traditionally hypermasculine field, how people are losing their male identity.

And that's definitely something that resonates with me as someone who's going through a career shift of being able to, you know, make money and be a professional and now moving back into a student role. And it's just been interesting for my own identity how that's shifted.

And it made me curious, this conversation, Ravina, about how we're socialized in a masculine way, how I am right, and how that impacts how I think about career shifting and being back in a place of human humility instead of expertise and how that question of agency shifts. So obviously, it's not a you can't map it completely in one. One thing is, is a real like it's a justice issue, right? It's something that people are not choosing in the way that Uber and Lyft are running their businesses. And really, they're the only game in town now pricing out a lot of those older style traditional taxi companies, which even those were problematic in certain ways in terms of identity. But that's that's kind of what stirred up in me. And I think there's just so much rich set of research questions that can be followed up on from this and the legal feel like is doing, but also in our field, just in looking at how these systems are impacting our lived identity out in the world.

Yeah, totally. I'm going to definitely latch onto that agency word that you keep throwing around there, because that's what I kept coming back to with this interview and mostly honestly with thinking about all of the different platforms and apps that Viña was speaking about during the interview like Uber and Lyft and really anything that involves this new gig economy and not even just ride sharing services, but just the gig economy in general and how powerless these people and these workers feel who have to use these platforms to make a living.

And it really just makes me think again and again about how important it is for the designers of these technologies and these platforms to think so critically about the unintended consequences of the choices that they're making when they're developing these applications. And it just makes me wonder, you know, is there is there a design choice or design decision that could be made in these apps that gives more power to the taxi drivers or I guess the Uber drivers who used to be taxi drivers or the food delivery service person who works for Postmus or whatever platform of your choice is? Is there a design choice that we can make that actually helps to empower these workers instead of taking their agency away from them and really making them question their identity? Like you were just saying, Dylan, whether that's masculinity, femininity or just their humanness or whatever it is that they hold on so tightly to in their old job. And it's interesting because I think about, you know, this is kind of a metaphor for the ways that not just platforms, but algorithms and technology in so many ways has begun to really run our lives and take away some of the power that we've held for so long.

And I'm thinking, you know, it's not just people who work for the gig economy. It's our movies that we watch are now the movies that are recommended to us, the items that we buy, the jobs we apply for, the ads that we watch or that come up for us on YouTube and different streaming services. We don't really have total agency or autonomy over those things anymore. It's kind of like the technology has taken over and just sort of told us, no, this is what you do now. This is the way we do things. When you take that into something that is just so important in our life, in such a big part of our safety and our security as humans, you know, the need to work and to get money and to have labor. It's you know, it's there's quite a bit more at stake when we take away the agency and the power from the users of those platforms.

Yeah, and a big topic that has come up in my field of religious studies for however many.

Thousands of years, humans have been around and doing sort of like religion work is that question of what it means to be a good life. Right. And this has been like a question about even like in Aristotle. Right. Like early philosophy, like what does it mean to to live?

Well, and I think one thing that you're pointing out just is that like work and creation and labor has traditionally been understood as as part of that.

And so what does it mean? Is it possible for someone to live a good life when their work is precarious, right. When their labor is precarious, where they don't have the agency? That they need they don't have that basic like Maslow's hierarchy of needs of security, right.

That fundamental level on the base for the work that they're doing, which, as we've discussed and as Viña discussed, is such a big part of people's identity. It's not just we don't just show up to just like perform, perform a function, perform a task and then and then leave. Right. It's like we whether we want to or not, we get to be defined both internally and then sometimes externally by by what we do. And that's really complicated, obviously. And Vienna got to the heart of like, why that that is so complicated and why it's there's just a lot of nuance there, obviously, which we can't really get into right here. But I think it does lay bare that that fundamental question of like, OK. There is something real at stake for people in how their identity is being shaped by this new landscape of the gig economy and of work, and it might not. And in this case, it probably isn't for the betterment of people's lives.

Yeah, I guess that's why we appreciate Vina and her work so much, right, because when I asked her what she thinks the future looks like, she was hopeful. And it's people like her that make me hopeful, too, that maybe we don't have to just submit and be powerless to these platforms that are taking over the economy and the labor force that we've known for our entire lives and that society is known for its entire existence. Right. We can we can lean on knowing that there's work being done in this space. And people like Viña are advocating for the rights of these workers and for the rights of anyone who is using any of these platforms. And, yeah, and that that gives me a little spark of hope in all of this and thinking that, you know, we can create the future that we envision and that we hope to see.

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