After years of insisting that gig workers cannot under any circumstances become employees, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has finally admitted that the company could make an employment model work.
Khosrowshahi made the comments in a December “Virtual Fireside Chat” with a UBS analyst. Video of the meeting was obtained and reported on by Lee Fang, who points out in an article for the Intercept that the rhetoric falls flat when compared to what’s going on in the physical world.
The core of the video centers around questions raised by the European Union’s December proposal for a widely popular set of strict rules that would reclassify millions of gig workers as employees. This would be a shot to the heart of the gig economy, which for a decade now has relied on weaponizing weaknesses in labor laws to exploit workers by minimizing their labor costs with sub-minimum wages while maximizing their workload through algorithmic overseers.
“We can make any model work, we really can, because our marketplace is incredibly flexible. There's a lot of demand for our technology, our service, our brand, our safety, our reliability,” Khosrowshahi said. “So any model can work economically for us—this is about what our drivers want and what couriers want, and they want flexibility, so we would very much prefer it because they prefer it.”
This contradicts earlier assertions by Khosrowshahi. Ahead of California’s vote on Proposition 22, the ballot measure his company successfully introduced to...
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