PUBLISHED IN THE VANCOUVER SUN
March 17, 2017
Opinion: Paying people less isn't economic innovation
Not long ago when we had stuff we didn’t like we just dumped it in the river.
It was super convenient and quick. Then the rivers started to catch fire.
In the wake of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, governments imposed tough regulation to reduce the amount of crap being dumped in rivers. Most of us now recognize that there are severe consequences when you abuse the environment.
So when are we going to learn the same lesson about the economy?
Last week, the provincial government announced their plan to allow ride-sharing technologies like Uber to operate in BC. Coming after years of consultation and delay, one might have expected a substantial strategy to address the opportunities ride-sharing technology presents to under-serviced suburban and rural regions of BC, the potential for augmenting strained mass transit systems, and the possibilities for incentivizing made-in BC solutions to create local companies and jobs. Even a minimal strategy might also have addressed the enormous challenges related to taxation, regulation and above all employment standards needed to ensure peer-to-peer service workers enjoy the rights and benefits required to achieve a decent standard of living.
Instead, we got a strangely hasty announcement that suggests some minimal rules to protect passengers while allowing Uber to hoover 20% of the ride-sharing economy profits out of the province. There is nothing to address these other questions, or one of the most controversial aspects of ride-sharing technology — the exploitatively poor treatment of drivers.
Uber drivers make not much more than the minimum wage, and usually much less. This has been established time and again, most recently by a Washington Post investigation. Proponents of Uber blow past this and any other objection as hopelessly stuck in the past. Uber is super convenient and quick, they say, as if this excuses all downsides and renders any objections as merely stuck in the past.
Ok. Who’s stuck in the past here?
The future belongs to businesses — and governments — which understand if you treat people like garbage, they’ll catch on fire too. Millions of Americans now burn bright with the intensity of their anger, their determination to punish the immigrants, the educated, the Muslims, the experts — someone, anyone — for the indignity of lives increasingly limited by lost jobs and precarious income, diminished hope and opportunity for themselves and their kids.
So has Uber single-handedly turned American citizens into a mob bent on burning down the institutions of democracy itself? Of course not. Just like tossing a beer can in the river isn’t specifically responsible for disrupting the food chain in our oceans.
But companies like Uber, which underpay their drivers while undermining more secure jobs elsewhere — and governments which allow them to do so — are degrading what we might think of as the economic ecosystem. Just like dumping waste in a river, there is a cumulative cost to small acts of economic exploitation, each of which corrodes a bit of the complex and interdependent economic systems needed to provide citizens and productive businesses with security and safety, and maintain mutual trust. When it inevitably begins to collapse, the damage rapidly gets out of control, and all of us are threatened. We’ve figured that out when it comes to the rivers, the ozone layer and, mostly, to carbon emissions, but It’s time to start applying the same logic to the landscape of the economy.
A healthy economic ecosystem needs competition, change and even disruption. But when inequality and polarization overtake fairness and opportunity for all, public confidence fails, economic growth stalls, communities clash, and extremism thrives. And when innovation always seems to mean lower wages, no wonder people are angry and resentful. After 40 years of free-market fundamentalism, it’s increasingly clear that governments need to act to re-balance the system. Here in BC we need a government willing to do the hard but worthy work of setting conditions that foster innovation while protecting people and productive businesses from predatory actors who can only make money by inflicting long-term damage to us all. That’s why a group of BC-based tech sector leaders last year called on the government to to invite on-demand ride services into the province with a set of policies that provide benefits for all. (link)
Let’s follow their lead and demand better, smarter, tougher regulations to encourage innovation, local job creation and a living wage for hard work. Taking care of our economic ecosystem won’t strand us in the past. It will help us all share a better future.