Peter Durham on The Battle of Gig Workers
Peter Durham
The Battle of Gig Workers
Claims and stances
Transcript
- 0:01 I'm gonna be talking about gig workers today.
- 0:04 Um, which a gig worker is kind of something like Uber or um Doordash, where it's like people who are almost like self-employed but work for like a larger company.
- 0:14 Um and so there's big a been a big controversy between what category gig workers are uh put in, um, between like employees and independent contractors, which are like the two main types of um workers.
- 0:29 Um like an employee is like someone who gets like a salary and has like health care benefits and stuff that are paid by the company, but independent contractor like more works basically just for themselves, and um they get paid like generally more per job, but there's no like health care or um overarching like safety nets for their um companies or for the who they work for.
- 0:53 Um so gig gig workers are kind of like set in between that, and there's this wasn't really a type of job before the past like decade, um, before like Uber and Doordash were made a thing.
- 1:07 And so a lot of people have been debating on like the laws on how they should be paid and what like Uber or DoorDash should be paying them and what kind of um healthcare like benefits they should be having.
- 1:21 Um in 2020, California um tried to like fix this controversy with a law um called A B5, and like in that there was a proposition um that basically made gig workers um in the category of employees, um, which basically the companies had to like pay them more and like pay for like certain benefits and like give them job safety, um, which the companies lost a lot of money um doing this and they fought back hard.
- 1:56 They spent over 200 million um to change how legislation was written and how um the California government uh thought about gig workers, and so it actually got overturned, and they currently they still uh classify gig workers as independent contractors, and so it really brings up the point like what should they really be considered?
- 2:21 Um it's it's really um there's not a defined area, it's really its own type of job, and there really needs to be more uh laws written that clarify what a gig worker should be paid and what kind of safety um job safety they should have.