"In California, one of the world’s wealthiest economies, I should be able to afford rent and pay my bills as a driver. I shouldn’t be forced to scour for public bathrooms or work 70-hour weeks to do this job. But that’s what these companies have forced upon us."
"Uber may have bought itself a law, but it has not bought itself reprieve. All labor has dignity, and driving for Uber or Lyft should be no different."
Cherri Murphy is a social justice minister and Lyft driver based in Oakland, California. She is also an organizer with Gig Workers Rising.
Sorry, can you explain? Why do you think that makes sense? If you're going to say "because this is the kind of thing a social justice minister would write", consider that:
1. You may have cause and effect wrong. The conditions this person lived through, especially as a gig worker, may have moved them to be a social justice minister; not the other way around.
2. You are not judging the article from the quality of the writing or the persuasiveness of the arguments, but instead by the background of the writer. Certainly it's important to note that this article is written from the experience of a _gig worker_, but IMO that only adds to the persuasiveness.
Background should have 100% been included in article to frame it. This is a piece by someone who only puts forward that they are Uber drive. The explicit omission of her other current work roles wasn't by accident.
Propaganda comes from both sides of an issue.
Does the article mention how long she has been a gig worker for? Because her bio would suggest she has potentially multiple income streams and also has had full time positions which I'm sure have equivalents in the area she resides in now.
> Minister Cherri Murphy is currently the Founder of Speak Life Ministries and a Doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union/Berkeley Theology in Berkeley. Her focus is on liturgical direct actions, specifically how participants combine public worship, art and ritual protests to intimately engage and invoke social change for those who have historically been de-centered. She is also a member and a licensed Spiritual Practitioner at Heart and Soul Center of Light, in Oakland California.
We've banned this account for repeatedly and egregiously breaking HN's guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with. We're trying for curious conversation here, not bashing each other with two by fours.
>Do you disagree that a job should mean that someone is able to afford rent and pay your bills?
Could we focus down on this question. Ignoring what led to this question being raised, I would like to better capture what is being asked here.
Is the idea that any job should be able to provide for any rent and any bills? I think that is an entirely unreasonable interpretation, but I want to make sure we are in agreement that there are some combinations of jobs, rents, and bills that aren't reasonable to be included.
If we can agree on that point, then how should we determine what pairings of job/rent/bills should be covered and should not? For example, maybe we should say that for any job, there should exist rent within 30 minutes of the job and bills that include X amenities which is affordable working that job. (For the moment let's ignore the complexities of deciding what should be included in X, especially given that people can acquire some very large bills in numerous ways.)
If for the moment we agree to the above standards for jobs, how should part time jobs work? Should it be that any part time job whose total pay when accounting for hours worked dips below the threshold we agreed to shouldn't exist? Say there was a job where working 25 hours was enough to meet the threshold, should we say that it would be illegal for the job to offer 24 hours or less a week (there would be a number of ways to enforce this, potentially having a minimum wage monthly in combination with an hourly minimum wage, but other options exist)?
I'm not trying to disagree with the sentiment. Instead, I want to better understand the details of the sentiment beyond the trivial case (all jobs, all rents, all bills) which has trivial counters, trivial to the extent that bringing them up almost seems like a bad faith strawman.
> Is the idea that any job should be able to provide for any rent and any bills?
No. We live a society of free will and choices. It's not reasonable for me to expect that _any_ job will allow me to live _any_ kind of lifestyle. I am firmly in the middle-class. I expect my job will allow me to pay my housing costs, but I don't expect it to pay for a brand new car every year and especially not if I spend all of my discresionary income on... something else!
It is reasonable for me to expect that a full-time job should allow me to have a roof over my head, food to eat, etc. I should make a living wage. There are examples of independent organisations that calculate what a living wage is and what constitues a living wage. (https://www.livingwage.org.uk/ in the UK for example) So I'm keen not to get in to an argument about what constitues a living wage, because people smarter than me have spent much longer than me considering it.
I am also not an expert. But I do know that europeans like myself look at the world of work in the US with abject horror, even when things here are not perfect.
>No. We live a society of free will and choices. It's not reasonable for me to expect that _any_ job will allow me to live _any_ kind of lifestyle.
I think reasonable can agree on this. The difficulty is deciding where to draw the line at, now that we have established there exists some line.
>It is reasonable for me to expect that a full-time job should allow me to have a roof over my head, food to eat, etc. I should make a living wage. There are examples of independent organisations that calculate what a living wage is and what constitues a living wage.
But these have certain assumptions built in. A living wage for a single adult with no kids is quite different than a living wage for an adult with 2 kids. So how many kids should be calculated in? Aren't we saying that if a person has greater than what ever number of kids we allow for, aren't we condemning them to being forced to live at an unlivable wage? We could define it to take into account something like number of kids, but then we have now officially begun discriminated on family status and will likely have a number of unintended consequences.
I'm not asking for an answer to this question, but instead a way to justify an answer. A method of proving instead of a specific proof.
This says more about the label than the opposition.
The "living wage" bakes in a variety of assumptions. First of all is the assumption that people shouldn't work if they're not out to earn a full-time living from that work. This view is typical of posh Americans who went to nice universities, had snazzy internships, and are now happily working full time.
It gleefully ignores those who need to start lower, and get entry level experience. Indeed, it is actively hostile to entire classes of people working.
A retiree who wants a little extra money. A high school kid from some gang-afflicted neighborhood, one who isn't going to college, but could benefit some low-key job in a restaurant, one that would keep him out of trouble, and get him a start for when he graduates. An ex-convict who's just spent five years in prison under one of Biden's drug laws, who could use a steady job to show his next employer he's hard working and didn't steal from work. An immigrant with marginal English language skills. That one girl I knew in school whose entire family was afflicted by a serious case of lead poisoning.
Now there's sure to be some sort of whining to the effect that some of these people need to be supported directly, but suppose they are -- why would that deny them the right to work?
Of course the cynical part of the political apparatus has absolutely no use for these people, since they don't vote, they don't campaign, they compete with the labor unions, and they're not always interested in sitting around and doing nothing on the government dime. They're useless in the revolution.
Oh, and of course the other thing! is that it helps draw attention away from the other big problem: a broken housing policy that has produced sky-high rents in so many major cities. Why fix that problem when you can make a new set of problems instead? One is hard work, and the other earns you praise as compassionate.
The point that you're ignoring is that most people working these "entry-level" jobs in fact DO depend on them to cover their living expenses.
What you're suggesting is to set those people in a race to the bottom along with the high school kid and retiree looking for "a little extra money". The point of setting a living wage is to set a bare minimum standard for employment.
You'd also find that the same politicians pushing a for a minimum wage are the ones trying to address broken housing policies, but you'd have to do research instead of just complaining.
No, that point that you're ignoring in pointing that out is that if they don't depend on these jobs then they're entirely unemployed. Chopping off the bottom of the labor market benefits a few people, yes, it just throws others who are less valuable to your political party into the abyss.
> You'd also find that the same politicians pushing a for a minimum wage are the ones trying to address broken housing policies.
Maybe, but not in New York and not in San Francisco. It's all "restrict the supply of housing" as if the laws of supply and demand are made up — indeed, they will deny supply and demand the same way a Koch-funded lobbyist tells you we should save the planet by burning more coal.
No, all jobs don't disappear. Some, however, do. Some are no longer profitable, more are replaced by capital investments. Economics denialism is quite strong in your circles, as I noted.
It's even more of a pity because we should be investing capital in meaningful things, like biotech or space exploration or environmental progress or what-have-you, instead of on stupid things like robots and restaurant apps.
> No, all jobs don't disappear. Some, however, do. Some are no longer profitable, more are replaced by capital investments. Economics denialism is quite strong in your circles, as I noted.
Ok, now we're getting to the root of the problem. This is argument is based off of your misunderstanding of economics. What you're missing here is this:
- Jobs are a function of demand.
- Demand is driven by consumers.
- Consumers need capital to drive demand
- The poor spend proportionately to their income much more than the wealthy.
That's the circle you need to be thinking about when you're asking yourself what the impact will be on jobs. The more you drive down living standards of the poor and middle class, the fewer jobs you will have, not the other way around.
This sounds like some sort of novel logical error, sort of like attacking the man rather than the argument but instead the idea seems to be:
arguments that emit from sources you would expect to be making such arguments are automatically discounted.
This leads to the conclusion that only arguments from unexpected sources are to be trusted - thus criminals who argue that crime is bad and snitches should get riches are to be trusted, but cops who say that crime is bad are not to be trusted on that matter.
Biblical societies had overt caste and class systems. Social justice tries to flatten anything resembling these. You mentioned that you think Jesus was an advocate of social justice but didn't explain why. Maybe our understanding of social justice is different from one another's.
I think populist dot press might be Bannon's own site. It heavily promotes his content, his weekly live stream, and it ties in to his social media on other platforms.
Even if it's not his own, this is his official Facebook page from which Bannon hosts his weekly live stream.
“Heads on pikes” is used as a hyperbolic shorthand for any kind of public shaming, especially when someone is fired.
But “Mount their heads on pikes at the corners of the White House as a warning the way they used to do to traitors in Tudor England” is nothing close to a common expression.
Being _unable_ to censor the president is what would be anti-democratic. Only in authoritarian regimes would a leader be able to force private companies to spread their message.
In a democratic country, you have the freedom to choose what you want to support and not support.
There is no democracy on a privately owned platform. Trump can say what he wants, but Twitter absolutely has a choice what, if anything, they allow to be published on their platform.
FWIW, Trump's time on Twitter is winding down. The only reason he hasn't received the ban-hammer from Twitter is his unique position as an elected official. January 20th shortly after noon, he will no longer exist on Twitter.
> There is no democracy on a privately owned platform.
Interesting. Would the right-wing be better off if Twitter were a government-owned entity, thus ensuring that their right to free speech would always allow unfettered access? Would we ever be able to convince them to trust the government enough that that was actually the case? Would they be able to overcome their impulse in favor of privatization over nationalization to allow something like that to happen?
"Uber may have bought itself a law, but it has not bought itself reprieve. All labor has dignity, and driving for Uber or Lyft should be no different."
Cherri Murphy is a social justice minister and Lyft driver based in Oakland, California. She is also an organizer with Gig Workers Rising.
Oh ok, that makes sense.