By the Johnson City New Labor Committee

Earlier this year in April, thousands of gig workers, mainly delivery drivers, organized a massive strike across at least 59 cities and 19 capitals in Brazil. This was their biggest gig worker strike since the #BrequeDosApps (#AppBrake) movement in 2020, which saw thousands strike all across Latin America. Fighting for demands like increased base-pay and travel-pay, workers rallied in the streets and shut down commerce, blocking orders from being received or picked-up. Restaurants operating exclusively with iFood, the Dutch-based monopoly controlling 80% of Brazil’s food-delivery sector, experienced a 100% drop in deliveries, proving the Brazilian drivers’ strength against scabs and strike-breakers. Liga Operaria, the class-conscious trade union center in Brazil, notes that “App-based delivery drivers (iFood, Uber Flash, and 99 Entrega, among others) are one of the most precarious sectors. Without labor rights or any social security, they risk their lives in grueling workdays that often exceed 12 hours a day!”

The question of a class-conscious labor line, in theory and practice, is one that fundamentally determines the direction of the trade union movement, and the mass movement more broadly, as it answers whether our movements and organizations are to spend their lives tailing the political economy of capitalism, or if the working class itself is to march at the head of its own movement and revolution.

As a more recent sector of the proletariat, modern gig workers have only started to realize our potential for both spontaneity and class-consciousness, with the Latin American strikes being emblematic of that fact. Gig-sector employment is defined by labor that is untethered from physical means of production owned by a company, instead being formally owned by us, and coordinated through the medium of a smartphone app. Unlike other transport and domestic workers who have no consistent workplace, we have no local agencies or physical infrastructure to act as stop-points between sequences of work. We have a production environment that is entirely fluid and based on the inconsistency of supply and demand across an entire geographic locale. Because of our misclassification as independent contractors, gig workers in the U.S. are excluded from concessions like a federal minimum-wage, overtime pay, collective bargaining rights, employer-paid taxes, and unemployment insurance. We are subjected to highly precarious industrial conditions built around digital-communications technology to meet the anarchy of local supply and demand. The fact that, nominally, we could make upwards of $5-10 more per hour than what formally-employed workers in similar industries make is contradicted by only 30-50% or less of our wage actually going to costs of living, the other proportion going strictly to costs of production that, unlike most other workers, we are forced to bear up-front.

Our unique instability is paralleled by our unique professional separation from other workers. We simply do not have any formal, or functional, co-workers to speak of, and our “shop-floor” is nothing but the geographic locale we reside in. This presents gig workers, those genuinely untethered from a formal workplace, with the task of organizing our own sectoral organizations and movement distinct from those similar sub-industrial organizations tied to physical capital.

In the U.S., there are currently two dominant tendencies in the gig workers movement: state-unionism and semi-independent unionism. As these terms imply, state-unionism embodies a labor movement wholly dependent upon the capitalist State for its existence, contracting, and funding, being opposed to the class-interests of the proletariat and fully entrenched in the maintenance of imperialism. The California Gig Workers Union perfectly represents this tendency by limiting their activity to advocating for the re-classification of gig workers as W-2 employees so they can become sanctioned by the reactionary U.S. Government. Most recently, as an affiliate of the SEIU, they have succeeded in colluding with Uber/Lyft to produce bill AB 1340, recently signed into law by Gavin Newsom, which creates a new system of California-based state-unionism, directly tied to the Governorship, outside of the NLRB. This treacherous compromise went to so far as to legalize company unions for gig workers (“unions” controlled by employers). Rather than fighting for the creation of a general industrial union, local shop-organizations, and the realization of a basic economic program independent of the bourgeois State, the CGWU ties all progress to recognition and absorption by its apparatus.

This type of union is not the enforcer of the proletariat’s demands, it is its middle-manager and arbitrary legal counsel. We do not, in fact, require any specific legal classification to organize around industry standards like the right to strike or a $30/hr minimum wage. While re-classification is absolutely an immediate demand to fight for, one that, however, doesn’t even raise our standards above the norm for most workers, tying union activity to recognition by the capitalist State is tantamount to liquidating the trade union struggle altogether. On the other hand, we have independent organizations like Rideshare Drivers United, also in California, and Tennessee Driver’s Union in Nashville that have no concrete political line regarding opposition to or acceptance of state-unionism, being more classically economistic in their approach by prioritizing economic struggles over the political struggle against state-unionism and the bourgeoisie in general. That being said, they are far more capable of genuinely organizing gig workers and assisting in the revival of the labor movement due to their current independence from the State.

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