Welcome to the Gig Worker U.S. Forum! This website was created by NLOC organizers to give gig workers in the service industry a professional organizing and communication space we otherwise wouldn’t have. Unlike other workers, and unlike non-service gig workers, app-based drivers and gig domestic workers have no professional workplace, local enterprise, or agency that can serve as an immediate grounds for unionization. Instead, we are constantly scattered across entire geographic areas, always going to and from merchants and/or residencies, with no recourse for working class community and solidarity. We are both physically and ideologically alienated from each other, and yet we all have common struggles against common enemies, this or that exploitative corporation or employer, and the capitalist ruling class as a whole. Gig workers everywhere must find creative and revolutionary means to unite with each other in the movement for better working and living conditions, and with other workers and oppressed people in the struggle for working class political power. We have chosen to utilize this Forum as a key tool in the class-conscious gig workers movement to develop professional relations, discuss collective grievances and demands, coordinate public events and campaigns, join and create Gig Worker Committees, and more. Any gig worker is free to join and interact with the Forum, but only service workers can create or join an affiliated Gig Worker Committee.
Gig Worker U.S. and its Forum are administered by the Editorial Board of The Gig Organizer. We are a newsletter written by and for gig workers in the service industry that can be physically distributed to gig workers and therefore used as a tool of collective organization. Distributing the newsletter, along with other gig worker propaganda, is the primary day-to-day function of local Gig Worker Committees, geographic organizations of gig service workers operating on- and off-the-job. By organizing geographically, we cast the widest net possible across all crafts and sectors of the service-based gig economy in order to concentrate the forces necessary for an All-U.S. Trade Union of Gig Workers. Due to our unique conditions of labor, gig service workers have the opportunity to collectively employ ourselves to corporations or individuals for wages and standards we set for ourselves. But this is only possible with a trade union that collectively organizes our labor in opposition to exploitation and oppression. For service gig workers, this would mean exercising collective authority over the usage of our labor and means of production, including those personally-owned by us and privately-owned by an employer, rather than being individually reliant on a capitalist or group of capitalists for our employment.
Service gig workers are subject to some of the worst levels of exploitation and political persecution in the U.S. and internationally. The “simpleness” of our labor allows capitalists to pay us the lowest possible wages needed to keep us working, which forces us to endure grueling hours and unsafe working conditions knowing we could starve or end up houseless without another gig. At the same time, massive corporations are making billions in revenue and profit from our labor, precisely due to how little they pay us. Gig employers are so obsessed with paying us as little as possible that they will strip us of basic employee rights to unionize, to strike, to employer-paid taxes, to full-time benefits, to a minimum wage, etc., so that we have no other option but to starve, lose shelter, and/or beg. Now with app-based gig work, employers can deflate the wages of entire industries and sub-industries by substituting regular W-2 work with cheaper, misclassified gig labor. The super-exploitation of gig workers blatantly exposes the capitalist nature of the U.S. Government and the usage of the legal system as a tool of the ruling class. Corporations are given absolute political and economic authority over their employees, the ruling class is given authority over the working class as a whole, and the little rights we’ve won can be easily stripped away. But workers have the ultimate power in society, the power of numbers and the power of labor. It is because a minority of “chosen” businessman have a monopoly over the means to employ us, that they can exploit our power to their own benefit, and to our detriment. We must break this monopoly of exploitation and impose our own: a monopoly of working class political and economic power. The capitalists are dependent upon us out-numbering and out-laboring them. This is an obvious weakness, for if we organize our numbers and our labor, we can easily seize control over our employment, and no longer be dependent upon the capitalists ourselves.
Gig workers, unite!