The second job you don't know you have
How self-checkouts, ATMs and airport check-ins are changing our economy. By CRAIG LAMBERT 5/15
Technology has knocked the bottom rung out of the employment ladder, which has sent youth unemployment around the globe skyrocketing and presented us with a serious economic dilemma. While many have focused on the poor state of our educational system or the "jobless" recovery, another, overlooked factor behind this trend is the phenomenon of "shadow work." I define shadow work as all the unpaid jobs we do on behalf of businesses and organizations: We are pumping our own gas, scanning our own groceries, booking our travel and busing our tables at Starbucks. Shadow work is a new concept, so as yet, no one has compiled economic data on how many jobs we, the consumers, have taken over from (erstwhile) employees. Yet it is surely a force shrinking the job market, and the unemployment it creates is structural. Thanks in part to this new phenomenon, widespread joblessness could become entrenched in the social landscape.
Consider what you now do yourself: You can bank on your cell phone, check yourself out at CVS or the grocery store without ever speaking to an employee, book your own flights and print your boarding pass at the airport without ever talking to a ticket agent — and that's just in the last few years. Imagine what's coming next.....
How Everyone Gets the 'Sharing' Economy Wrong
Uber isn't the Uber for rides—it's the Uber for low-wage jobs Christopher Mims, Wall St.Journal, May 24, 2015
If you want to start a fight in otherwise polite company, just declare that the "sharing economy" is the new feudalism, or else that it's the future of work and all the serfs should just get used to it, already.....
In the minds of critics, perhaps the worst offender in how it controls its labor force is Uber. Uber sets the prices that its drivers must accept, and has lately been in the habit of unilaterally squeezing drivers in two ways, both by lowering the rates drivers are paid per trip and increasing Uber's cut of those wages….
Boosters of companies like Uber counter that they allow for relatively well-compensated work, on demand. When I asked them for comment, Uber officials pointed to previously released data suggesting just that. The most recent report, a collaboration between Uber and economist Alan Krueger, paints a fairly rosy picture of Uber's job-creation abilities. Uber has said in the past that world-wide it is hiring 20,000 new drivers a month, and in this report it claims that in major American cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., drivers are averaging more than $17 an hour.
But this data doesn't reflect what Uber drivers actually make, for the simple reason that it doesn't include drivers' expenses. Work by investigative journalist Emily Guendelsberger, for example, shows that Uber drivers in Philadelphia, a fairly typical city for the service, are probably earning only a fraction of that. According to Ms. Guendelsberger's admittedly limited sample of 20 drivers, including herself, it was around $10 an hour after expenses.
It isn't minimum wage, but it's a far cry from Uber's previous claims about what drivers make, which reached the height of absurdity in May 2014, when the company claimed that the median income for drivers in New York was $90,000 a year. Months of investigation of that claim by journalist Alison Griswold yielded not a single driver in New York making that much.
What this all means is simple: Uber and its kin Lyft, which is more generous with its drivers but has a similar business model, are remarkably efficient machines for producing near minimum-wage jobs. Uber isn't the Uber for rides— it's the Uber for low-wage jobs.....
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