[Editorial Note: The Partisan is republishing the founding announcement of The Gig Organizer, publication of the Gig Worker U.S. Forum – New Labor Organizing Committee. We welcome this new and exciting development in the class-conscious labor movement.]
We are excited to announce the launch of The Gig Organizer, a newsletter written by and for gig workers in the service industry, and its Forum, the Gig Worker U.S. Forum. The following is our statement of purpose and plans for the future:
Affiliates of the New Labor Organizing Committee (NLOC) are responsible for constructing independent, class-conscious, and class-combative trade-union machinery as the basis for rank-and-file democracy, economic action, and political power. Trade unions and shop committees seek to unite the majority of workers in a workplace, enterprise, or area, at the point of production, and within a single trade or industry, around the struggles for better working and living conditions. The NLOC differentiates itself from the establishment unions by organizing workers in the long-term struggle for political power amidst short-term struggles for immediate and minimum demands. Through The Gig Organizer and our Forum, Gig Worker Committees seek to do just that for app-based ride-share and delivery drivers, as well as for app-based and other informal or “self-employed” domestic workers. This could include workers for TaskRabbit, neighborhood baby-sitters, self-employed house maids, or even migrant workers “illegally” contracted for landscaping or construction on some Yankee’s property.
Gig workers reside in the outskirts of everything sacred and formal about capitalist exploitation. We have been forced out of regular employment and into professional isolation, coerced into performing the most menial of tasks for an absolute minimum of wages, and lacking basic employee or even citizenship rights. As a result, we constantly straddle the lines between underemployment, poverty, and pauperism, all while facing the constant threats of vehicular manslaughter, domestic, employer, and customer abuse, and for many of us, deportation and Fascist incarceration. Gig employers have been able to legally justify and our second-class treatment as wage-slaves by misclassifying us as “independent contractors” or refusing to provide any form of classification at all, and have access to the militarized forces of the capitalist State to enforce this persecution. In other words, our rights are entirely up to the bureaucratic decisions of our employer and the State. Gig workers will only gain liberation once we can decide for ourselves the rights we get and the rights we deserve, compared to other workers.
Despite the newness of app-based gig work, an ultra-precarious, super-exploited sector of the service industry has existed since the origins of industrial capitalism. Karl Marx himself, father of scientific socialism and the first great leader of the international labor movement, once wrote about us:
“The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages. We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of “domestic industry.” It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of which the different categories of labourers dispose. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down1.”
Gig work truly has degraded us into animals being constantly hunted down and taken advantage of for our individual weaknesses, but also for the collective strength we can bring to capital, to profit. Migrant domestic workers literally are hunted down, not just violently by ICE agents, but always by rapid capitalist predators who stalk tiendas and enclaves to expropriate labor from. The main difference between modern app-based gig workers and historical “self-employed” domestic workers is the socialization involved involved in the technological co-ordination of our labor. Whereas “self-employed” workers have to be physically hunted down by numerous consumers and capitalists, app-based gig workers are digitally hunted down en masse by the same corporations, on behalf of consumers. Because of the greed of the ruling class, their desire for ever greater efficiency at ever lower costs of labor, gig workers are now omnipresent throughout commercial society. This gives Gig Worker Committees the unique ability to operate at the point of production without its members needing to be on the job or in physical proximity with each other. Our day-to-day physical isolation can be utilized to coordinate a massive spread of forces across an entire geographic area. Corporations employ our vast labor to manufacture profits, but we can leverage our labor to cease production and win demands. To build the professional rapport among gig workers necessary for unionization and labor action, organizers must use all available social and technological means to unify our scattered forces independently of corporations and the capitalist State.
The Gig Organizer serves as a voice for the voiceless, written by and for gig workers who are among the most oppressed and impoverished laborers in the world, to illuminate the path forward in our movement towards liberation by exposing the demands that need to be won and the strategies needed to win them. Attached to The Gig Organizer is the Gig Worker U.S. Forum, a collective digital communications tool widely available to the gig worker masses that can be utilized both on- and off-the-job. Through these organizations, gig workers can organize, mobilize, and develop their class-conscious labor movement. Gig workers do not have to live in poverty. We do not have to lack basic rights of citizenship and employment. We can raise ourselves above the depths of the ruling class, if only we dare to struggle and dare to win.
To satisfy our demands for a dignified living and standards of labor, gig workers require a trade union, but not just any union. We cannot, for example, allow ourselves to be enveloped by the same government that misclassifies us and criminalizes our labor struggle. We must maintain absolute political independence from all organs of the capitalist State and all capitalist political parties. Otherwise, a “union” becomes nothing more than a shell-corporation for the racketeering of stolen wages (involuntary “dues”) on behalf of the employer and ruling the union is supposedly fighting against. These state unions are unfortunately predominant in the labor movement as a whole, and the gig worker movement in particular. But their inability to actually organize the rank-and-file against their oppressors continues to more and more diminish their popularity. Today, the vast majority of workers are unorganized, so it is now left up to us, the class-conscious members of the working class, to restore the rank-and-file democracy and political independence that the state unions destroyed.
The requirements for a Gig Worker Trade Union are even higher than that of regular employee unions. In addition to setting democratically-elected terms, conditions, and standards for the management and employment of our labor, the trade union would have to establish itself as the primary employer of the rank-and-file in opposition to and competition with the capitalist employers. App-based workers, for example, are arbitrarily divided into different corporations due to slight variances in technology only for these corporations to provide less than the bare minimum in terms of hiring, on-boarding, firing, recruitment, promotional, and managerial processes. This is because gig corporations are nothing more than software owners with a big pocket book. The gig workers are the ones who actually own the physical means of production we use on the job. In return, we are given barely what is required to remunerate our costs of production and are left a minuscule portion to spend on our own needs. A union could take advantage of the collective power of our physical ownership to establish our own democratically-elected policies, procedures, and leadership such that the corporation is the one being contracted for their technology, not the other way around. Then when our labor is contracted out, either by individual capitalists or a gig-corporation, we can ensure these contracts have terms and conditions actually beneficial to the majority of us. Gig Worker Committees lay the basis for the professional relationships required by trade-unionism through the congregation and unification of the gig worker rank-and-file into bodies of mass organization that can operate both on and off the job. On the contrary, state unions like CGWU, IDA, and ADU don’t operate as mass organizations at all, they operate as slush funds and political action committees for the lobbying of corporate and Party lawyers and officials. The rank-and-file are not just left at the same level of alienation, disorganization, or class-consciousness as before, their unity is actively diminished by the imposition of an unnecessary and arbitrary bureaucracy that only further deflates their wages.
The Gig Organizer calls on all gig workers in the U.S. and the World to overcome their physical, political, and ideological disorganization and unite in the struggle for authority over the employment of our labor and property. We are numerically superior to our exploiters, it is time we become politically superior as well. It is time for us to organize. It is time for us to rebel!
This article comes from Edition #1 of The Gig Organizer. Read and download the full edition here.
