Nov. 10, 2023 ❧ Wage theft by Uber & Lyft, Election day results, and Joe Manchin's long-awaited departure from the Senate
Plus: WeWork files for bankruptcy, SAG-AFTRA makes a deal with studios, rap lyrics lead to prosecution, Russian pranksters screw with world leaders, and cats make faces at each other
FIGHTING BACK
NEW YORK CITY’S TAXI UNIONS SUE UBER & LYFT FOR HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN UNPAID WAGES
The New York Taxi Workers Alliance has won a $328 million settlement from the ride-share companies Uber and Lyft, who were found to have stolen wages from more than 80,000 workers across the city. According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, “the companies’ policies withheld hard-earned pay from drivers and prevented them from receiving valuable benefits available under New York labor laws.” Employees for these and other app-based ride-share services are considered independent contractors rather than employees, which made it easier for companies to take advantage of the murky boundary between paid and unpaid working hours. According to Matthew Cole in Jacobin,
One former driver and NYTWA member named Malang Gassama calculated that Uber and Lyft stole at least $25,000 from their pay packet. Theft on this scale was achieved by illegally deducting sales taxes and Black Car Fund fees (8.875 percent and 2.5 percent of the ride price, respectively) from drivers’ earnings rather than adding them to the passengers’ bill. Uber claimed in its terms of service that only the platform’s commission fee would be subtracted from drivers’ fares, a blatant lie. It also claimed that drivers could charge passengers for tolls, taxes, and fees despite being provided no means to do so. Lyft employed a similar tactic, skimming an “administrative charge” of 11.4 percent — equivalent to the sales tax and Black Car Fund fees for New York drivers.
The workers also won a new contract granting them sick leave, $15 per hour for training, assistance recovering stolen wages, and formal hiring notices that clarify how they will be paid. It’s a significant step for gig workers towards earning the same rights as formal employees.
At the same time, delivery drivers employed by apps like GrubHub and DoorDash launched similar legal action that resulted in a “Minimum Pay Rate for App-Based Restaurant Delivery Workers” this summer, which entitled them to $17.96 per hour not including tips as well as sick leave, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. This was following years of these companies getting away with paying their workers below minimum wage and no benefits because of their status as contractors. Cole writes,
A study found that over half of workers’ wages were paid from customer tips. Riders earn an average of $14.18 per hour with tips and $7.09 per hour without. Their hourly expenses are $3.06, reducing their take home pay to $11.12 per hour with tips and $4.03 per hour without tips. For a typical food order of $33.09, $18.33 goes to the restaurant, $4.11 to the worker in tips, $2.11 to the state in taxes, $3.06 in fees charged to the consumer by the app, and $5.48 in commission to the app (a share of the order subtotal). Platform revenue is $8.54, with $4.32 paid to the worker and the platform taking $4.22. This is poverty pay.
ELECTION RESULTS
✶ Ohio voted to enshrine the right to an abortion in its state Constitution, by a 57 percent majority. It’s just the latest rebuke to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the result of long hours of organizing by Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, a broad coalition including members of the ACLU, Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood. The state also voted to legalize recreational marijuana, which is a nice bonus!
✶ Democrats took control of the Virginia legislature, handing Governor Glenn Youngkin a major setback. Like in Ohio, reproductive rights were a key issue, with some voters calling abortion access their top issue. Youngkin had wanted to pass what he called a “reasonable” 15-week abortion ban with “exceptions”; now, with both the Virginia House and Senate in Democratic hands, he’ll have a much harder time. Virginia also elected Danica Roem, who had faced a wave of GOP attack ads targeting her gender identity, as the first-ever openly transgender state Senator in the South. As Roem puts it, “they went all-in on transphobia, and they lost.”
✶ In Kentucky and Mississippi, incumbent governors held on. Democrat Andy Beshear won a second term as governor of Kentucky, dashing the hopes of Republican challenger Daniel Cameron by a margin of 52.5 to 47.5 percent. (Beshear’s father Steve was also governor from 2007 to 2015.) Meanwhile, Mississippi’s Brandon Presley wasn’t able to unseat Republican governor Tate Reeves—although there were irregularities, as nine precincts in majority-Black Hinds County appear to have run out of ballots before everyone could vote.
✶ In Tacoma, the “renter’s bill of rights” still hangs in the balance. In the last News Briefing, we told you all about the proposed legislation, which would place strict regulations on Tacoma landlords’ ability to raise rent and evict their tenants. The vote has been a tense one, as someone mailed an unidentified white powder to Pierce County election officials on Wednesday morning, temporarily halting ballot counts. As of Friday morning, the ballot measure is slightly ahead, with a margin of 50.6 percent “yes” votes to 49.4 percent “nos,” but only 470 actual votes make the difference, and there’s still tallying left to do. Stay tuned!
✶ Across the country, school board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty have crashed and burned. By now, you’re probably familiar with Moms for Liberty; they’re the far-right pressure group that keeps trying to get books banned and teachers fired for mentioning topics like race and gender in U.S. schools. Well, we’re happy to report that their preferred candidates for school board comprehensively ate dirt in Tuesday’s elections. In Iowa, Moms for Liberty endorsed 13 candidates, only one of whom won—and as Newsweek reports, “Every single candidate endorsed by Moms for Liberty in Minnesota, Kansas, North Carolina and Washington lost their race.” It turns out the majority of voters dislike overbearing censorship and puritanism, even in red states!
AROUND THE STATES
❧ A Georgia judge has ruled that rap lyrics can be used as criminal evidence. In the racketeering trial of Atlanta rapper Young Thug (born Jeffery Lamar Williams) and his associates, a key point of contention has been whether the record label YSL (“Young Stoner Life”) is also a violent gang called “Young Slime Life.” To support their case, prosecutors intend to use lyrics from Young Thug and his labelmates’ songs—such as “Gave the lawyer close to two mil, he handle all the killings” and “I never killed anybody, but I got something to do with that body”—as evidence.
Assistant District Attorney Mike Carlson says the lyrics “prove the nature of YSL as a racketeering enterprise, the expectations of YSL as a criminal street gang,” and include “party admissions for even the offense of murder.” The defense, meanwhile, argues that “art has got to be separated from real life,” since simply rapping about violent crimes doesn’t prove that someone actually commits them. In Congress, representatives Jamaal Bowman and Hank Johnson recently introduced the Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act to ban this type of prosecution, arguing that there’s clear racial bias in how rappers are treated in court.
They have a point; after all, nobody ever prosecuted Johnny Cash for shooting that man in Reno “just to watch him die.” But despite the controversy, Judge Ural Glanville ruled on Thursday that YSL artists’ lyrics could indeed be introduced as evidence at their trial, which is scheduled to begin on November 27th. Whether or not the rappers are guilty of any violent acts, prosecuting them for their words poses a clear threat to the First Amendment right to free expression. If convicted on the basis of their lyrics, their case should be appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.
❧ After 118 days on strike, SAG-AFTRA has reached a tentative deal with Hollywood studios. Although the full terms haven’t yet been announced, the actors’ union is calling this “a deal of extraordinary scope,” and says that it’s secured minimum pay increases, a “streaming participation bonus,” and protections against the use of AI, along with better terms for pensions and healthcare. This was a historic strike, in which SAG-AFTRA’s more than 60,000 members walked the picket line at the same time as the Writers Guild of America, a combined labor action that hadn’t happened since 1960. The proposed deal will go to the union’s national board on Friday, and be voted on at an undetermined later date. Already, though, it’s provided yet another example of the real, material results workers can win when they stand together.
WHO SAYS THE FREE MARKET DOESN’T BREED INNOVATION?
❧ The “co-working” company WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week amid a glut of empty office buildings. Once considered a “unicorn” startup, the company, which rented out multi-million dollar office spaces and sold desk space to remote workers post-2008 Recession, is now regarded as the prototypical startup scam. It will forever be remembered for squandering billions of investment dollars and for its megalomaniacal CEO Adam Neumann, whose most famous act was the hilarious attempt to trademark the word “We.” Despite being valued at $47 billion by the Japanese SoftBank at its height, the company never once turned a profit. Because, of course it didn’t! As Eliza Levinson wrote in Current Affairs back in 2020, “WeWork has never been more than a bougie office building where people pay to work while pretending they’re having a good time.” And while it’s fun to revel in the schadenfreude of rich investors getting scammed, ordinary people were also victims here: more than 2,400 people lost their jobs when the company collapsed in 2020, and surely more will following their latest reorganization. As Levinson wrote in her essay:
Ultimately, an economy built on the inherently inflated promise of unicorn capitalism is a loss for all workers, be they in “tight jeans and motorcycle jackets” or fighting for more than $10 an hour. Still, it’s crucial—particularly as we strive to articulate more nuanced descriptions of workers in our contemporary economy, and to build mass solidarity—to remember to see all affected workers, not just the wealthy ones.
PAST AFFAIRS
Check out our interview on The Current Affairs Podcast with Maureen Farrell, business reporter with The New York Times and co-author of The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion.
In this lively conversation, Farrell and Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss:
How Adam Neumann, despite being manifestly full of shit, managed to charm seemingly everyone who met him (and got them to ignore such personal idiosyncrasies as his habit of being drunk at work)
How WeWork successfully branded itself as a "technology company" when it was, in fact, quite obviously a real estate company
How the company evaded scrutiny and managed to hoodwink so many supposedly smart investors for so long
Why Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos is going to prison while Adam Neumann, who in many ways was similarly misleading, is still a multi-millionaire who is now going back into the very industry he failed in
How the WeWork story illuminates broader trends in contemporary capitalism, namely the ability to pass off grandiose and delusional visions as viable companies
How the stories of Adam Neumann and Donald Trump both show that there is no justice in the world
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ The U.S. launched airstrikes on a site in Syria on Wednesday, which the Pentagon says was being used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to store weapons. The attack comes in retaliation for a series of rocket and drone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, as well as the shooting down of an American drone by Iran-aligned Houthi militants in Yemen. It’s the second time in two weeks that the U.S. has carried out strikes against Iranian proxies, and signifies an elevation of violence between the U.S. and Iran. The risk of direct conflict between the U.S. and Iran continues to grow after the U.S. moved warships and fighter aircraft, as well as 4,000 more troops, into the region with the express purpose of deterring Iran amid the war between Israel and Gaza. Jonathan Hoffman writes in Responsible Statecraft:
It goes without saying that for the Middle East itself, such a war would be catastrophic, destabilizing the region politically, economically, and militarily. The war would threaten to empower illiberal actors across the region at the expense of genuine stability. The profound human and material costs would plague the Middle East for generations to come. It should be clear from the past several decades that throwing money, weapons and military assets at the region often has profound negative consequences. In this case, Washington is risking further escalation and even direct U.S. involvement in a region-wide war.
❧ A new bill in the Scottish parliament would make “ecocide” a crime comparable to murder. Introduced by Monica Lennon, a member of the Labour Party who represents Central Scotland in parliament, the “ecocide” bill would allow criminal penalties ranging from 10 to 20 years’ imprisonment for “unlawful or wanton acts” that harm the environment on a large scale. Currently, several countries around the world recognize ecocide as a crime, including France, Ukraine, Ecuador, and Kazakhstan among others; Vietnam was the first, passing its ecocide law in 1990 to denounce the United States’ use of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons that devastated its jungle ecosystems. It’s unclear if Scotland’s version will pass, since it will need the support of 18 more Scottish MPs to leave a “consultation phase.” It’s questionable, too, if incarceration is a suitable tool for environmental justice; surely confiscating all the assets of people and companies who commit ecocide would work just as well. Still, it's good to see a country like Scotland treat intentionally destroying the environment as a crime of similar seriousness to homicide. It is, after all, the future of human life on Earth that mass pollution and the people who commit it are killing.
❧ Italy’s Prime Minster Giorgia Meloni fell for a prank call last month from a pair of Russian comedians. On the call, she accidentally revealed her true feelings on the Russia-Ukraine war to someone she thought was “the president of the African Union Commission,” but was actually a member of a notorious Russian comedy duo known as Vovan and Lexus who run a show on Rutube (Russia’s equivalent of YouTube). According to Forbes, the pair are known for pranking politicians and other public figures: They claim to have once tricked Bernie Sanders by posing as climate activist Greta Thunberg and pledging to support his campaign. On another occasion, they posed as Vladimir Putin on a prank call asking Elton John about gay rights. Last year, they posed as aides to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and testified to the Australian Senate that Russian operatives had been stealing kangaroos and echidnas.
The comedians are also known to be highly pro-Kremlin and have been alleged to be Russian intelligence operatives, including by the British government, though the duo deny this charge. If true, could explain why they chose Meloni—who has a reputation for being staunchly pro-Ukraine—as a target. And they got her to admit some things about the conflict that she probably would not say publicly, including that there was “a lot of tiredness” over the war and that “Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not going as expected.” Meloni also said she has “some ideas on how to manage the situation, but I’m waiting for the right moment to put them on the table.” Right now, the connection between the comedians and the Kremlin is only speculation. But perhaps this saga shows the potential of enlisting comedians as tools for espionage. Sacha Baron Cohen, a new line of work may have just opened up for you!
❧ LONG READ: As it wages war on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli government is cracking down on internal dissent from Jewish and Muslim citizens who oppose the war. In The New Yorker, Masha Gessen explains how critics of the bombing of Gaza are being arrested and accused of terrorism for what amounts to “suspicion of disloyalty”:
The current crackdown on speech, which involves arrests, police interrogations, and so-called warning talks conducted by the Shabak, the security services, is largely carried out by a task force established earlier this year by the national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to identify cases of incitement to terrorism on social media. Before he was a minister, Ben-Gvir was a far-right activist. In 2007, a Jerusalem court convicted him of incitement to racism for carrying signs and posters with statements such as “Expel the Arab enemy.” Hassan Jabareen, who heads Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal center, told me, “Ben-Gvir’s job is to protect my safety, and he is known as the most racist official in the history of Israel.” Jabareen added, “We are aware that Israeli Jewish society is passing a very, very hard time. But this emergency time is happening under one of the most racist governments in the history of this country.”
After October 7th, Lea Tsemel, a legendary human-rights lawyer who has been representing Palestinian inmates in Israel for more than fifty years, began to see something unprecedented: people were getting arrested for social-media posts and even likes. The day we spoke, Tsemel had just returned from a hearing in the case of a Palestinian lawyer, a citizen of Israel, who had posted, in the days following October 7th, “I had a fantastic night.” (Tsemel does not represent the accused but attended the hearing, with several other lawyers, as a show of solidarity.) The young woman had just passed the bar; a group of Jewish lawyers had filed a complaint asserting that her post indicated support for Hamas.
On October 30th, a court in Nazareth heard the case of Bayan Khateeb, a fourth-year student at the Technion in Haifa who was arrested for an Instagram story she posted on October 8th. The post featured a skillet with a shakshuka simmering on a stovetop, the eggs almost set, with the caption “We will soon be eating the victory shakshuka,” and a Palestinian-flag emoji. A group of Jewish students filed a complaint with the Technion, alleging that Khateeb was expressing support for Hamas, and she was arrested and held overnight. When the police sought to extend Khateeb’s detention by six days, she testified that she was not a competent cook and had posted the picture for a small group of friends who were going to taste her triumph in the kitchen. The judge ruled that there was probable cause and ordered her held for one more day; on appeal, the measure was reduced to five days’ house arrest, with a ban on using social media. Khateeb has also been suspended from the Technion.
Much of Israeli civilian life is on pause at the moment. Universities have postponed the start of the school year; courts are not hearing cases, except for urgent matters such as arrests. Many of the people who are being detained on what amounts to suspicion of disloyalty may never be charged, but the courts are effectively meting out punishment by placing people under arrest.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Another GOP debate! All of the candidates are still terrible. There was a distinct note of doom and gloom in the air on Wednesday night, as five Republican presidential candidates lined up for a debate moderated by NBC. Each GOP hopeful bemoaned the party’s defeats in Tuesday’s elections, with Vivek Ramaswamy saying that “we’ve become a party of losers,” and each attempted to pitch themselves as the only solution. None of them, though, seemed to consider that Republican policies themselves might be unpopular. The candidates doubled down on their anti-abortion stances, quibbling only on the details of possible bans, and they seemed desperate to outdo each other in their support for Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, with Ron DeSantis saying that “I will be telling Bibi, finish the job once and for all.” In a lighter moment, Ramaswamy called Nikki Haley “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels,” while she used the pithier “scum” to describe him. To the pair, we can only say: no need to fight! You’re both right.
❧ Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has announced that he will not seek re-election in 2024. We bid a long-overdue farewell to arguably the national Democratic Party’s single worst member: an audaciously corrupt coal baron who has dedicated his time in the Senate, particularly in his position as a swing vote over the last three years, to scuttling climate legislation and pursuing drastic cuts that hurt America’s poorest people. If you want a single moment to encapsulate who Manchin is, look no further than the time he popped his head out from his $700,000 yacht to tell a group of protesters he would not support a bill to lower drug prices, fund universal pre-K, and extend the Child Tax Credit, later saying he feared Americans having an “entitlement mentality.”
The remaining Democrat in the West Virginia primary is Zack Shrewsbury, who has campaigned in support of renewable energy investment and unions. Shrewsbury also supports bringing back the Child Tax Credit, which Manchin helped to kill, and still defends killing, even after it more than doubled child poverty. If Shrewsbury wins, he’d be a serious improvement (his campaign logo is also cool as hell).
But this will be a tall task. There is fear within the party that Manchin was the only Democrat who could conceivably win in deep-red West Virginia, which went for Trump by nearly 40 percentage points. Manchin’s departure may make it more likely for Republicans to retake the chamber next year. Manchin already voted like a Republican in many cases, but there is a very good chance he could be replaced with someone even worse. There is also speculation that he could be retiring from the Senate to pursue a third-party run at the presidency under the “centrist” No Labels group (which has received millions in corporate donations). He says he will be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle,” which sure sounds like a presidential campaign. In The New Republic, Kate Aranoff writes that his entry could hand the election to Trump:
“What might have just been a Senate seat lost to Republicans might now become an unimaginably grating spoiler campaign that primarily benefits corporate funders.”
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CAT FACT OF THE WEEK
Cats have nearly 300 different facial expressions!
After reviewing more than 100 hours of cat videos (an enviable job, if ever there was one), psychology professor Brittany Florkiewicz has discovered that domestic cats can make at least 276 distinct facial expressions, proving that “cat communication is much more complex than we’ve previously assumed.” Of that number, she says, around 46 percent are “friendly” expressions, while 37 percent are “aggressive” and the remaining 17 percent are “ambiguous”—though not, presumably, to other cats.
There is even an official coding system used by scientists to cat-alog feline facial expressions. It is known as the Cat Facial Action Coding System, or CatFACS, which is based on the work of Paul Leyhausen, who provided some early cat-egorizations of offensive and defensive behaviors among cats. Take a look at this nifty table of them from his 1979 study:
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.