mastodon.green is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Plant trees while you use Mastodon. A server originally for people in the EU, but now open for anyone in the world

Administered by:

Server stats:

1.3K
active users

#gigworkers

0 posts0 participants0 posts today

Yale Insights: A Simple Thumbs Up or Down Eliminates Racial Bias in Online Ratings‌‌. “In a study of an online gig-economy platform, Yale SOM’s Tristan Botelho and his co-authors found that the ubiquitous five-star rating system could subtly propagate discrimination. But they also found a surprisingly simple fix: switching to a two-point scale (thumbs up or thumbs down) eliminated […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/02/22/yale-insights-a-simple-thumbs-up-or-down-eliminates-racial-bias-in-online-ratings/

The people who say, "I don't mind if my phone spies on me. I'm not doing anything illegal" haven't considered the economic impact of corporations spying on them. Now people are getting charged more for fast food on payday, shoppers get charged more for frozen pizza at dinner time, gig workers get paid less if they have credit card debt and are desperate for a gig. This is on top of the monopolistic price gouging.
pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/soc
@pluralistic
#monopolies #pricegouging #gigworkers #privacy

pluralistic.netPluralistic: The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 3) (11 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Does anyone know anybody that delivers for Walmart plus? Or anyone who works for Walmart? I have a question and I don’t want to actually call Walmart to ask them:

When I order a grocery delivery and pay with SNAP, how does that driver get paid/tipped?? Does Walmart pay them more for the snap orders, and if so are they billing the government an extra 10-20% that the SNAP office pays in cash or is walmart paying it themselves??

I’m just so curious how this works because I’m not tipping any of them ever. If I have to buy something with my credit card I try to have it shipped but even then sometimes someone drives it here, so who is paying their tip?

I’m anti-tip culture (I believe the employers should pay their employees themselves, not expect them to beg customers to do it at their discretion) so I’m delighted if we have somehow found a way to make Walmart pay its delivery employees themselves, but I suspect that’s not happening. And I’m just curious how those people get paid when I pay with snap.

"On Facebook and Reddit, workers compared notes. Previously, they’d known what to expect from their pay because Shipt had a formula: It gave workers a base pay of $5 per delivery plus 7.5 percent of the total amount of the customer’s order through the app. That formula allowed workers to look at order amounts and choose jobs that were worth their time. But Shipt had changed the payment rules without alerting workers. When the company finally issued a press release about the change, it revealed only that the new pay algorithm paid workers based on “effort,” which included factors like the order amount, the estimated amount of time required for shopping, and the mileage driven.

The company claimed this new approach was fairer to workers and that it better matched the pay to the labor required for an order. Many workers, however, just saw their paychecks dwindling. And since Shipt didn’t release detailed information about the algorithm, it was essentially a black box that the workers couldn’t see inside.

The workers could have quietly accepted their fate, or sought employment elsewhere. Instead, they banded together, gathering data and forming partnerships with researchers and organizations to help them make sense of their pay data. I’m a data scientist; I was drawn into the campaign in the summer of 2020, and I proceeded to build an SMS-based tool—the Shopper Transparency Calculator—to collect and analyze the data. With the help of that tool, the organized workers and their supporters essentially audited the algorithm and found that it had given 40 percent of workers substantial pay cuts. The workers showed that it’s possible to fight back against the opaque authority of algorithms, creating transparency despite a corporation’s wishes."

spectrum.ieee.org/shipt

IEEE Spectrum · Shipt’s Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought BackBy Dana Calacci

The California Supreme Court's July ruling upholding Prop. 22 effectively ensures gig workers are independent contractors and not employees. That means the state labor commissioner — which has done its best to help keep gig companies accountable over the years — no longer has jurisdiction over individual gig workers' complaints. I examined nearly 200 wage claims gig workers filed with the state since 2020, a fourth of them directly related to Prop. 22. The issues gig workers complain about aren't going away. Now what?
Here’s my story for CalMatters.

#gigwork #gigworkers #prop22 #uber #instacart

calmatters.org/economy/2024/09

CalMatters · California companies wrote their own gig worker law. Now no one is enforcing itProp. 22 promised improved pay and benefits for gig workers from firms like Uber and Instacart. But California isn’t enforcing it.

#GigEconomy #GigWorkers: "The first myth that buttresses the gig economy is in its name: the word “gig.” “Gig” is a word that was first used to describe jazz acts at clubs in the ’20s—a far cry from the type of work that 41 million people in the US engage with today. Today, for most, gig work is not a fun hobby, an optional extracurricular, or a side hustle to earn extra pocket money. In fact, for more than two-thirds of workers on these apps, the job is a full-time haul. Most gig workers I spoke to work overtime, meaning the patchwork of jobs from apps they can cobble together often overtakes the forty hours we typically associate with a workweek.

The eight-hour workday was a hard-won victory by labor organizers of yesterday. Today, gig corporations are actively undermining those victories. In Hustle and Gig, sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle details past labor struggles that afforded many workers protections like the forty-hour workweek. She puts gig workers’ exclusion from these protections plainly: “Gig economy workers are often second class citizens in the labor world, denied many of the same rights taken for granted by workers in the mainstream economy.”"

logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-

Logic(s) MagazineThe Gig Is Up“The eight-hour workday was a hard-won victory by labor organizers of yesterday. Today, gig corporations are actively undermining those victories.”

#India #UrbanCompany #GigEconomy #GigWorkers: "A year after women staged mass protests against working conditions at India's popular home services app, Urban Company, female gig workers face a tough present and a highly uncertain future.

A decade ago, Urban Company emerged as a beacon of hope for women wanting to gain economic independence in a country with one of the lowest numbers of female workers in the world — on their own terms and in their own time.

But as the years have passed, workers say the company has stripped away their flexibility and autonomy.

Urban Company workers told Context they had to pay the equivalent of two months' salary just to begin working on the app.

Many say the pressure to perform for an ever-more demanding algorithm is unsustainable."

context.news/big-tech/video/wo

www.context.newsWomen at India’s Urban Company fight for gig workers’ rights | ContextA year after mass protests, Urban Company gig workers struggle with harsh job conditions and uncertain futures, but continue to battle for their rights