What we owe gig workers
Labor advocates and allies in Albany are feuding over a draft bill that aims to grant some union rights to precarious workers who toil at irregular hours and less regular wages for app-based “gig” employers like Uber and Lyft. This family feud is all the more frustrating because there’s a perfectly reasonable New Deal-era state law still on the books for when workers slip through the cracks of a patchwork of worker protections and fissured workplaces. The current bill purports to do the same by creating a system of “sectoral bargaining” for gig workers, while severely restricting the number issues they can bargain over, outlawing their ability to strike and robbing them of their unemployment insurance by replacing their statutory protections as workers with an opportunity to collude as a guild of “entrepreneurs.” Everywhere from the House-passed PRO Act, which would amend the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to make the […]