 Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming today. Welcome to the Economic Policy Institute. My name is Liz Rose, and I'm the Communications Director for the Economic Policy Institute. And I want to welcome you here today for our panel on the gig economy. I know this is a hot topic because my mother, who's 88, just took her first Uber. Let me just do a few quick housekeeping items before I introduce our moderator who will introduce the panel. First of all, today's session is being recorded. It's going out live on the internet. Welcome to the internet audience. And it is being recorded. And you can watch it later at epi.org slash events. So that will be there. And I also wanted to let you know that for those of you in the room, there are bathrooms out the back door. If you need them, just go out the back door. I also wanted to let you know that Stephen Hill's book is for sale right outside. So after the panel, around noon, you should go out, buy a book, and come on back in. And he will be happy to sign it for you. In addition, Stephen has an article in the American Prospect. The American Prospect and the New America Foundation are both co-sponsors of this event, along with EPI. And I wanted to thank our co-sponsors who are both good friends of the Economic Policy Institute. I'm honored to introduce our moderator, Anna Louise Sussman. Anna covers economics, both gig and otherwise, for The Wall Street Journal. She previously worked for Reuters, where she covered energy, banking, and shipping. She's also written extensively on gender issues. She graduated from Brown University and holds a master's degree, or master's degrees, from the London School of Economics and New York University. Take it away, Anna. Morning, everyone. Before I introduce Larry and Stephen, I was just wondering how many people here have participated in the gig economy in the last month or so? Like drove an Uber or took an Uber? And how many people took Uber to this event? Don't be ashamed, OK. OK, just wondering. So we know it's widespread in the room, at least. So Lawrence Mitchell, or Larry, is a nationally recognized economist. He's the president of EPI. In the more than two decades he's been with EPI, he's helped build it into the nation's premier research institution focused on US living standards and labor markets. EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working Americans and their families, and proposes policies to protect and improve their economic well-being. He has co-authored all 12 editions of a report called The State of Working America. A book that remains unrivaled is the most trusted source for a comprehensive understanding of how working Americans and their families are faring into today's economy. Larry's primary research interests include labor markets and education. Thank you. And he is somewhat skeptical of the gig economy, so he'll be taking that approach today. Stephen Hill is a senior fellow with the New America Foundation and a whole spring fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His latest book, which is available outside, is called Raw Deal, How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers. He's the author of five other books, including the internationally praised Europe's Promise, Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age, which was selected as one of the top 15 books of 2010 by the globalist. His articles and media interviews have appeared in The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The FT, The Guardian, lots of other places that you can look up, because there's just too many. And with that, he will tell us about his new book. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. Can you hear me all right? Good morning. Thanks to Larry and Economic Policy Institute for hosting this forum. It's a great opportunity to be here. I'm from San Francisco in the epicenter of the gig slash sharing slash on-demand slash peer-to-peer economy. There's so many names for it. And so being in San Francisco, I was sort of immersed in it. Probably San Francisco's were immersed in it more than anyone else in the country early on and starting to really try to figure out what exactly is this? Does it represent somehow a step forward, particularly in the aftermath of the economic crisis in 2008, in which the recovery has still been fairly tepid? And then even looking forward to all this discussion about automation and robots and what's happening. So I have set out to write a book really more about the impact of technology on jobs and the labor force, both today and looking into the future. And that's where I found some very disturbing patterns and trends that I think we have to really think about more deeply than simply like, yeah, Uber's a lot better than a taxi cab. Which it clearly is. Taxi. I mean, Travis Callaghan, CEO of Uber, his ace in the hole is always the taxi companies and just how bad the service has gotten in most cities. But there's a lot more there than that. What I really wanted to write was a book that would help us understand what's at stake if we don't get this right. My big fear is that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say, wow, we didn't recognize. We didn't understand what this was. And we didn't regulate it correctly. And now it's even worse. And now the various interests are embedded into our system. And it's even harder to change than it would be here at the outset. I mean, a somewhat of an analogy is the 401k system and how we thought that was going to replace pensions. And that's how it was sold to us. It was going to be better than pensions. And now we know, decades later, that it actually wasn't a replacement at all. And in many ways, it's made our retirement system more feeble. And not many people have been able to afford to put much money in their 401ks when wages have been flat for 25 years. So anyway, in my book, besides the gig sharing economy, I mean, the gig and sharing economy is just one part of it that I look at. But you meet other people like Chris Young, an auto worker for a Nissan plant in Tennessee. He works in the auto plant right next to other workers doing the exact same job. Those workers wear the Nissan shirt because they work directly for Nissan. He does it. He works for a contractor. He's a temp worker. In fact, it's what's called a permitemp. Now it's a whole new term of people. As a contractor, he's making half the salary. He has really no safety net. He has no job security. And he's been working there even though he's a temp for several years. And that's why they're now called permitemp. Some of these permitems have been working five, six, seven, eight, nine years. And they're still considered temporary workers. The temporary workforce was one of the fastest growing segments of the labor market coming out of the great recession in 2008. And so these are increasing number of what the jobs are looking like. Other types of people, some of you have probably heard about the Facebook and Google buses in San Francisco has garnered a lot of national headlines. What you didn't hear much about are the Google drivers and the Facebook drivers. They don't work for Facebook or Google. They work for a contractor. And their day starts at 5.30 in the morning, goes till 8.39 o'clock at night. It's actually, you're only allowed to work a certain number of hours according to federal laws about how the company gets around that is they make them take about four hours off in the middle of the day. And they can't work another job in the middle of the day. And some of them live too far away to go home at that time. So they just hang around the parking lot practically indentured servitude, making low wages, again, no job security, no safety net at all. And so I think we really have to be concerned about what's happening to the quality of jobs. And of course, this has been happening already beyond the gig or sharing economy. It's been happening even before the Great Recession. But the Great Recession accelerated a lot of this. And now this new gig and sharing economy is a new tweak to that picture. So if you look at the gig and sharing economy, what you can see is, for example, with Uber, it's a great service, very convenient. I mean, it fulfills one of America's great fantasies. Every American wanted to have their own limousine that showed up at their door, at their own beck and call. And now it looks like we have that. The problem with it is, one, the jobs are pretty menial. Even Uber's own data, and I like to say we can trust Uber's data about as much as you can trust China's and Greece's data. But nevertheless, so this is the best that the data tells us from Uber, that these jobs are part-time, 80% of workers are part-time, about half of them work, 15 hours or fewer, and about half of the workers last a year on that platform. And then they get tired of, as one Uber driver I interviewed said, they treat you like gum on the bottom of your shoe because they cut their wages on a fairly regular basis. They both cut the amount that the drivers get per mile, and then they increase the amount that Uber takes of each fare. Uber used to take 5% of each fare, and now they're up to 25%, and for some Uber service is 30% of each fare. So I mean, these are basically part-time temporary jobs. In some ways, you can think of Uber as a temp agency in which all their workers drive. And there's no safety net. There's a lot of debate, even lawsuits around whether these should be workers, are they 1099 contractors, which is how Uber treats them, or should they be regularly employed W-2 workers that will work its way through the courts? We'll see what happens with that. But the point is that, from a labor perspective, there's not a whole lot there. I mean, for the drivers who I've interviewed, what you find is that the drivers who have been driving it the least and the shortest amount of time like it the most. Those who have been driving it the longest and try to drive it the most hours are the least happy. And I think that's telling. A lot of people say to me, like, I ask my Uber driver. And they say they really like it. And I say, well, next time, ask them how long they've been driving it. And the ones who have been driving it two, three months, they're still in their honeymoon period. They maybe haven't gone through a pay cut yet. And then those who have been driving longer, they're getting pretty fed up. And the thing that there was a report by Alan Kruger, an economist at Princeton, it was a report from Uber. And Kruger sort of put his name on it. And a lot of people ask me about that. So I'll just say very quickly, the thing to know is that, for one, all the data came from Uber about how much their drivers were making, how many hours, and all these sorts of things. And two, interestingly, that report sort of refuted what Travis Kalnick, the CEO of Uber, previously had said. He was saying with a straight face that Uber drivers were making $100,000 a year. And I was amazed at publications like The Washington Post and others were just uncritically reporting that. Like, oh, Uber says their drivers make $100,000 a year. Well, this is better than taxicabs. But the report, the numbers in the Kruger report showed that, based on the hourly wage that they said they were making anywhere from $17 an hour in LA to $30 an hour in New York, in order to make $100,000 a year, these drivers would have to be driving like 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. So the first ridiculous boast from Travis Kalnick bit the dust with that report. But the second thing that was interesting about it was that the numbers came from October 2014. They released the report in January of 2015, just in time for the conference of mayors who they were trying to impress. And then two weeks later, they cut the Uber drivers pay once again in 48 cities, a 40% decline in the amount they earned per mile and told them, you can make it up because the price will be lower and you'll have more fares. So you can just drive more fares. And so classic speed up, just drive more rides and you won't lose any money. So when it comes to Uber, you just have to keep in mind that what they say is this is a company that is a startup, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors there. They're always trying to portray things as the best light they can, and they're always trying to attract more funders. And so in order to do that, they have to keep things as rosy and as upbeat and as like we're taking over the world as much as possible. But it's not even clear at this point that Uber is actually, in fact, making money, because they're spending it as fast as they're raising it. And then there's the environmental issues with Uber. As I said earlier, the way they're pleasing you is by flooding your streets with cars. The problem with taxis we now can see clearly is that there just weren't enough taxis on the road. The medallion system artificially constrained the number of taxis. And part of it was to keep the wages higher for the drivers. But it meant lousy service in many, many places. And so now that competitors come along, who's basically flooding the street with cars, yeah, now you have the convenience of hitting your button and the car shows up. But places like San Francisco, New York City, the congestion is getting much, much worse as a result. Downtown San Francisco, where I live, you try driving through that now, and it's extremely hard compared to even three, four years ago, because there's so many more cars circling and circling trying to get waiting for their fare. So you have here a clash of conveniences. Yeah, it's convenient to have that car show up. But if you get in that car and now you're waiting in the car another 15 or 20 minutes to get where you need to go, that's not going to be very palatable. So I think we really have to think about our streets as a public utility in a way that makes us think about how many cars can you have on the road of whatever kind? And how do we monitor that? Interestingly, the Uber app actually makes it possible to track cars of all types. And we could create congestion zones in various cities. And there's other interesting things we can do with this app technology in Finland. They're taking this technology and putting it into the public transit system. So you can get on a shuttle, a public shuttle, and everyone tells the driver where they want to go. And the driver can plot the course in real time instead of having it set route all the time. So there's a lot of interesting things we can do with this technology if we start thinking about it in a smart way of how to use it and not just turning it over to a company whose stated mission is to flood the street with cars because that gives them more market share and they want you, the consumer, to have your own limo at your disposal. But then there's other companies like Airbnb. There's TaskRabbit, some of the labor brokerages like Upwork and others where their model presents other challenges. I mean real quick on Airbnb, again, another gig economy company that started the origins of it actually, I think, were quite positive. They created a technology that made it possible for people who had a home or renting a place and didn't have a lot of income to rent out a spare room in their home and make some extra money. I don't think there's a huge problem with that. Again, if you put the right regulations on it. But what happened along the way is that Airbnb has drifted very far from that origin. And now it has been taken over by professional real estate operatives who are either taking entire apartment buildings in San Francisco. I've gone to some apartment buildings where everyone in the building has been evicted, including seniors, disabled people, one man with advanced stages of Parkinson's just flat out evicted so they can Airbnb these apartment buildings and turn them into what's now called Airbnb hotels. You have some hosts as they're called. In San Francisco, LA and others that have dozens of properties that they are Airbnb. So these are hardly the quote, regular people that Airbnb likes to feature in all of their promotion. The regular people are renting out a spare room. You have property managers who are managing the homes of absentee owners who just invested in a place like San Francisco to New York and increasingly in Washington DC. They buy a home and then they contract with a property manager who just rents that out to tourists. So basically what's happening in this situation is that it's taking the local housing stock, which is needed for local residents. And it's pitting the needs of local residents versus the needs of tourists. And this is why city after city decades ago passed laws saying you can't rent for fewer than 30 days because they didn't want their housing stock to be turned into something for tourists because it takes away from the needs of and from the housing supply for local residents. So now this new app has come along and allowed, it's basically a giant loophole that has allowed the professionals to get past these laws that exist still in most cities, though some cities like San Francisco have tried to work with them and legalize it. But they run into all sorts of problems because, for example, in San Francisco they said, OK, as a host, you have to register. Well, only 10% of the people have registered. And how do you track that? If Airbnb won't give up its data, which it refuses to do, you don't know where the hosts are. You don't know how many nights they're renting out. So there's all sorts of implementation issues that weren't thought through in that San Francisco legislation in other cities that are now trying to figure out a way to legalize it because the regular people like it. And here's the thing, Airbnb knows about these problems. They could kick off the multi-property landlords and professionals with one stroke of their computer mouse. They know who's renting out multiple properties. And they know if a city requires hosts to register, they know which hosts have registered and which have not. And if they wanted to cooperate with cities, they could use their platform to regulate themselves and regulate the hosts in a way that would get rid of some of the worst abuses that's going on out there. And I can tell you story after story, but I'm going to move on to other things. But Airbnb is refusing to do this. They're not willing to kill the golden goose. At this point, the professionals are providing anywhere from 40% to 50% of their revenue. And for a company that's, again, they're going for global market share, they're waiting for their IPO, that's just not what the venture capital that's backing this company that's valued at $25 billion. It's just not what they're interested in doing at all. So this is creating a lot of problems at the local level in many, many cities. And then you have the labor brokerages like Upwork and TaskRabbit and some of these others, Instacart. And in some ways, Airbnb, I mean, Uber fits into this category, but they're a little bit different. For these companies, what they've done is they take Upwork, that's a platform in which they have millions of freelancers who tend to be people who can do something for you, but they don't have to be near you or in your region. They can create a report. They can design a graphic logo if you need it. They can write a law brief if you want. There's all sorts of professional types of people on this platform. And literally, I think they have like 5 million freelancers. Now, the challenge that this one is creating is that it's basically a race to the bottom, because if I'm on it and you're on it and you're on it and you're on it, we all bid for the job. And of course, that's how it's always been in a lot of freelance work. But the lowest bid wins. And in this case, you're going up against workers in the Philippines, Thailand, India, other places who also can now do this sort of work. And you go on their website and you look to see you can go by different occupations or different needs, different professions that you're trying to hire. And you can see a very clear pattern where the people from the United States or Europe or Canada or wherever, they're bidding $40, $50 an hour. And the people in Philippines, Thailand, India are bidding $2 or $3 an hour. So you're going up against workers who are going to undercut you. And many of them, from all reports, are really quite good at what they do. And so if you're an employer or, and many times, some of these are companies that go there to hire numerous freelancers, they've got a choice. Do I hire somewhere from the US for $8, $9, $10 times the price? Or do I hire someone from there? So now we thought, well, OK, that's always been the case to some degree. But at least domestically, we don't have to worry about that so much. Well, then TaskRabbit came along. And what TaskRabbit does is take that same model. Well, originally they did. They've sort of tweaked this model a little bit, but others are still doing it. And they basically created a place where freelancers, contractors, could go on their platform, get hired out to do jobs like raking your leaves, constructing your IKEA furniture. Just all sorts of odd jobs that you can think of cleaning your house, doing some carpentry around your house. And so everyone would go on there. And they bid for the jobs. And again, it's the lowest bid that wins. And so you'd see a lot of people complaining, like gosh, I'm a professional at this. And I'm getting underbid. Usually I can get $25 an hour for what I do. I'm getting underbid by people who are charging $8 an hour. And increasingly, you'd hear a lot of reports from people saying, like, they're not making minimum wage even on these platforms. Because by the time you factor in the amount it took to bid for this job, then to go back and forth to secure the job, then to show up for the job. And maybe the person isn't there right away. So you have to hang around waiting the amount of time it takes to look for the next job. Think about a lot of you are probably employed for an employer where you get a salary or a 40-hour work week or close to it. And so the time you're at your job, from 9 to 5 or 8 to 4, whatever, is all paid time, even with a rest break. You go to a meeting with your coworkers. That's paid time. If you stand around the coffee pot or water cooler talking with your coworkers, that's even paid time. With this gig economy, none of that time is paid. The only time that's paid is when you are at your computer producing that graphic file or producing that report. Or when you're doing the specific job, raking the leaves, putting up the IKEA furniture, whatever you're doing. That's the only time that's paid. Everything else, whether it's training or any meetings that it took to finish the job, that's all on your time and dime now. It's if Tom Brady, I'll use for you as an example, he only got paid when he throws a touchdown pass. And all the other times, he doesn't get paid. The other plays, the training, all the off-season or anything like that. You're only getting paid for the specific time that you're working. This is a major reconception of how we think of work. And my fear, we're going to hear from Larry. There's some ambiguous ambiguity about how much, how big is the gig economy. We'll have a good discussion about that. But beyond the gig economy, what I think these companies are doing, they're pioneering a new type of technology that makes it much easier to hire and fire people. And so if you're an employer and you have a choice of hiring a bunch of contractors, freelancers, 1099 workers, instead of W2 workers, you're going to save 30% on your labor costs. Because by hiring the 1099 worker, you're not paying for Social Security, Medicare, health care, injured worker, unemployment, paid sick leave, paid vacation, none of that. That's all goes away. And so if I'm an employer and you're an employer and Larry's an employer and I'm hiring contractors and you're not, that puts you at a distinct disadvantage. And so my great concern is that this technology is going to create a situation where more and more employers are going to just hire all contractors, or as many contractors as they can get away with. And I'll leave you with a good example, pharmaceutical company, Merck. They had a plant in Philadelphia, had 400 employees. They laid off, excuse me, they sold the plant to another company. The company lays off all 400 employees, hires them all back as contractors, and then proceeds to make the same pharmaceutical for Merck that Merck was making. This is what I think we really have to be careful of. And my fear is that the gig slash sharing economy technology makes this much easier to do. And we could very well see more and more of this happening in the future. I think it's going to be something that if it does take hold in a way that many people are saying it not only will but already is, then it will transform the economy and undermine the middle class in a way that even the Great Recession wasn't able to do. And the flat wages of the last 25 years hasn't been able to do. So with that, I will turn it over to Larry and we'll have a good discussion about how big is the sharing gig economy? Thank you. Or as I sometimes call it, the share of the crumbs economy. That's good. Well, the first thing I want to say is Steven's written a very good book. It's nice to read a book by a journalist because it goes quicker and easier. And a lot of good stories and a lot of good insights. And my only exception to it that I'm going to take is that to sort of broaden the lens. So I'm being presented as the skeptic about the gig economy. What I'm skeptical about is the hype that says that this is huge. Everybody's going to become a freelancer. Everything that you know is outdated and outmoded. And get with it. And I think that's mistaken. There's incredible hype. And I think it's an interesting thing to reflect. And I'd like to hear from Hannah and Steven and Pat and people in the audience. But why is there so much hype? What are the special interests? What is the, I mean, is it just so much media attuned to Silicon Valley and tech that's built in? You know, there's been a few journalists who have poked holes in the hype. Justin Fox, when he was with Harvard Business Review and then I think it was last summer. Anna, probably one of our first articles for the Wall Street Journal, poked holes. And since then, a lot of the hype has subsided, at least in some quarters. But I'm going to go further. I've been looking for and at whatever data claims that the gig economy is a huge deal. And every time I look at whatever the claims are, the data just implodes right before my eyes. And so I want to go over some of that. And I approach this from the jobs labor market perspective. And I'll talk a little bit about the robots thing, which Steven didn't talk about. But he has that sort of a technological frame for a lot of what he presents, that technology is moving this way and it could disadvantage us and we have to beware. So I don't think technology is the frame. I think the frame is we've had eroded job quality, stagnant wages for decades. The gig economy is sort of a new wrinkle on it. But it's not all that new and qualitatively. And that what really is going on in the world around us is the systematic disempowerment of workers based on policy choices made on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and power. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. OK. So are gig jobs large and exploding? And my answer is no. So I've developed some new data that I got an insight from a recent report last week from the Pew Foundation. So let me just go over this. Justin Fox did a nice thing in his article a number of years ago where he showed that the share of employment that is self-employed, gig workers are self-employed. The share of workers who are self-employed has actually been going down for many years. And that is not consistent with an exploding gig economy. And that's the top line. 1995, 11.7, now self-employment is just 10.1%. And that includes people who are incorporated or not incorporated. What I learned from the Pew Foundation report is that many people who are report to the Bureau of Labor Statistics that they are self-employed are themselves employers. In fact, the Pew report claims that three out of 10 workers are either self-employed or work for someone that says they're self-employed. But I got some unpublished data from BLS and some published data and developed a series for how many people are self-employed who don't have paid employees. And that's the lower line. It's roughly been 7.5% since 1995. And there's a big gap here, but this is 2014. So we have 7.5% of employment are people who are self-employed but don't have paid employees. Now, some analysts that I respect, Larry Katz, Alan Krueger, are reporting to journalists. I read about it in newspaper articles, magazine articles, that a lot of people don't report their gig jobs. And I think that may be true. I mean, it actually undercuts the whole theory that we're all going to be full-time gig workers. Because if gig work is really your second or third job, then it really means it's extra income. And then you really have to ask, why are people needing all this extra income that they don't get on their regular job? And not that we're all going to become gig workers. So this is the trend of people who have more than one job, multiple job holders. Now, this is actually somewhat of a myth on the left that everybody's working two, three jobs. But it's around 5% of the workforce. And it could be that there's more jobs than people aren't reporting. But it's clearly not a lot of folks. OK, then there's this other group that people like MBO that you quote a lot. They talk about non-employer establishments. These are basically, let me read you the census term for this so you know what it is. Businesses that have no paid employees and are subject to federal income tax, right? These are businesses. These are non-employers or self-employed individuals operating unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner's principal source of income. So there's 23 million of these in the most recent data. But what you can do is the Census Bureau provides information on the total receipts, the total sales of these establishments. And you can match the total sales of these establishments relative to the total sales of all establishments. And you can find that in 2013, these 23 million non-employer establishments represented 3% of total sales, of which it was roughly 3% in 1997. So this is clearly not an exploding or huge phenomena. In fact, I mean, the Census Bureau reports that this group is so inconsequential that they don't even include it in many of their surveys. OK, so as Stephen points out, and Uber now says, and as well as the Kruger Report, that most of the drivers are part-time. And then half of them leave after a year. So if that's true, then it's not like people are, it's not their main game. So stop saying that we're all going to be gig workers. And there are people on both the left and the right that have adopted this. We're all going to be gig workers. So this is a nonpartisan, bipartisan critique. Now, where I'm coming from is just to quote Stephen, is that I think it's a mistake to focus excessively on the gig economy as the thing to be worried about. I mean, it's a thing to be worried about. But as this is from his page 17, it's been decades where workers haven't gained from productivity. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Corporate profits are way up. So there's clearly something a lot more going on that preceded this whole discussion of the gig economy. And so if we're going to talk about policies for workers, we have to talk about policies across the board. OK, so let's get into the robots a little bit. And there's a chapter on it, and Stephen reflects a lot of the discussion about robots. So my view is don't fear the robots. And welcome the robots. And the first thing is, and I may not go over all the data because I'd be glad to provide it, there's no footprint that there's any explosion of automation. Well, OK, I have to go over that. You can get data. We know the following, that labor productivity has actually decelerated since 2005. We know that capital investment is actually slower in the period since 2002 and during the recession. We know that investment in information equipment has been rapidly decelerating. That's all of this. Relative to 73 to 95, the late boom from the 1990s to 2002, the Bush Recovery 2002 to 2007, here's the great recession. And investment in software in the workplace is quite decelerated. So the fact is, you can't believe that there's a large-scale implementation of automation if the stuff that goes with robots is not present. That's just so it's everywhere but in the data, as to what Robert Solow said about computers a long time ago. So the other thing is the idea that we're not going to have jobs because of robots is simply, I think, mistaken and false and total baloney. And for the following reason, you get a lot of, I've watched so many videos and heard so much stuff about tremendous things that robots and automation are going to do or are doing. Now, most of it is in the future. We know it's probably not going on right now. But none of those do the following. No employer is going to implement automation unless it lowers costs. If it lowers costs, what is going to happen? Well, one of two things. It's either going to make them very profitable and or it's going to allow them to not raise their prices as much as they otherwise would. This is never discussed. Most of the effect we know over time has been that places where there's a lot of productivity raise their prices less than other sectors that have lower productivity. High productivity sectors, that's why TVs are so cheap. That's why haircuts are more and more expensive and why going to the orchestra is more and more expensive and movies, et cetera. So the fact is that if the prices are not going to rise as much, what does that do? Well, it means that people who buy that stuff, whatever it is, are either going to buy more of it or when they buy whatever they want to buy, they're going to have money left over. And so basically, unless people have run out of stuff they want to buy, because everything they're going to buy, if they're not going to buy the money on a TV, they're buying something else. Anything else they're buying creates jobs. So unless we have run out of stuff that people want to buy, there will be jobs. That will it be exactly the same jobs? I don't know. I think probably yes. But the question becomes the quality of jobs, et cetera. And on that, there's not a lot of evidence that automation is leading to inequality. In fact, not a lot of evidence. I think that all the evidence says that it is not. And I cite here the work I've done with my friend and former colleague, John Schmidt, who's here. And even all the center-left economists, like Larry Katz and David Orter, Larry Summers, who used to claim technology was leading to inequality and who this year have basically said, that's not true. And why is it not true? Because we know that since 2000, all of the job growth has been in the occupations with the lowest wages. And if you're not expanding the jobs with the highest wages, then you can't be creating demand for workers that is unmet that is very, very skilled. The inequality argument is the employers are really demanding college grads, really skilled workers. We can't find them. Their wages are going up a lot, blah, blah, blah. It hasn't been true. And we also know that the wages of college grads have been stable since 2002. We know that interns are working for free, college grads. Things that are free are not in short supply. That's my economics 101. OK, so. And in the future, BLS says that the jobs of the future are going to basically require the same amount of education that we have now. I can give you the details. So let me say a couple of things about policies. My first thing is, what are policies for the gig economy? And I think, and I said it in an email, my policy is enforce the damn laws. And I think the question to ask is, why are the laws not enforced? What is the political, what's going on there? I think that the other thing is to think about if people are taking jobs that aren't really so good, then we have to ask, why are they doing that? And the answer is, is because they don't have good options. Why don't they have good options? Well, then we have to talk about the broader context of what's happening in jobs and wages. And it raises the question of, how much will this occur if we allow our economy to get full employment when people have more options? Will Uber be able to keep a steady growth of taxi drivers in that situation? But the actual laws that have to be enforced for, for instance, Uber, the whole issue, are you an employer or not, is it on one way? We saw a case by the NLRB yesterday on taxi drivers that said that they were employees and could unionize. But a lot of it has to do with worker comp. And it's the tax bureaus. More than, and I didn't understand this until this week talking to my colleague, Ross Eisenbray and David Wilde who runs the Wage and Hour Administration. But it's not really the Wage and Hour laws because it's not like Uber, whose most workers are part-time, are violating overtime laws. And they probably make more than minimum wage. So it's not a big issue for Wage and Hour. It's an issue for people who should be collecting the taxes or people who should be getting access to unemployment insurance or worker comp. And we have to ask, why is it they are not being enforced? And then what else is to be done is basically EPI's agenda for raising America's pay, full employment, restraining the top 1%, rebuild our labor standards, overtime minimum wage, provide citizenship to undocumented workers who were exploited. And modernize labor standards to provide all the sick leave, family leave, fair work we're scheduling, et cetera. Those are the broader set of issues that we need to shape the labor market and wages and job quality within which the gig economy is operating. And so with that, we'll go back to, I'm going to get that at the front page so we can read it there. Thank you, Dan. OK. OK. So I'll just quickly respond to, I mean, there's no question that a lot of this data is ambiguous. But I don't think that means that there isn't data out there. And Larry mentioned people like Larry Katz at Harvard and others who are coming up with and basically saying that the traditional ways that we've been counting the workforce are not serving us well at this point. The BLS relies a lot on household surveys and people self-reporting. And so Larry Katz has been looking at things like the increase in number of 1099 forms, which is a form that a worker files with the IRS in order to get paid. When they get paid, they file a form. Instead of the W-2, they file the 1099. Increase the number of people filing Schedule C, which is the self-employment form. And so, I mean, this is a quote from Larry Katz. He says that, make sure I'm looking at the right thing. Give me one second. These discrepancies suggest the growth of gig and share economy workers who, one, receive 1099 income. Two, file Schedule C forms in their taxes. But three, don't answer the standard government question as indicating they are self-employed and don't say they are a multiple job holder. In fact, Katz's interviews with the, this is from an article I wrote from Medium, how big is the gig economy. Katz's interviews with gig economy workers found that a majority of those who also have regular non-gig employment don't answer that they have, quote, multiple jobs when asked that standard multiple jobs question. Quote, even in many cases, where they have significant online and other non-traditional job income. Now, why people are not reporting accurately? Who knows? But others, Zen Payroll, which is a service that provides payroll service for a lot of companies, reports a huge increase in 1099 workers across many major US cities. Up to 20% increase in cities like Los Angeles, Austin, Orlando, San Francisco. Companies like Intuit Management Software Company, they report they found 3.2 million American workers are actively engaged in some kind of gig work, at least part-time. Intuit is saying by 2020, there'll be 7.6 million such people, more than four times a number of Walmart employees. So there's a bunch of sources like this in the article, sort of disparate sources trying to piece together. Is this a growing part of it? Now, some of the sources come from industry people who have invested interest in sort of making it seem like this is a big part of the growing economy. You should invest in our company. So you have to really try and weigh all these different disparate sources of data. But I think we also have to realize, I mean, for example, just look at something as simple as the unemployment versus employment figures. I mean, the standard economic understanding of that is as unemployment comes down, employment goes up. They're inversely related like a seesaw. And yet, we've been living in a time where the unemployment rate is going down, yet the employment rate really hasn't been going up. It's sort of flatlined. Well, and BLS numbers show 12 million workers have dropped out of the labor force. Even Janet Yellen, whose job is, let's face it, to sound as upbeat about the economy as she possibly can. Even she has said that the job picture is less rosy than the declining unemployment rate indicates the surge of, quote, marginally attached and discouraged workers, as well as an unusually large number of individuals who are working part-time who would like full-time jobs. So what is all to say? To me, it says that the economy is changing. When I look at these different sources, there seems to be a consistent pattern beyond what BLS numbers say. I do seriously doubt that we are accurately counting these workers. If we can't even count something like the unemployment versus employment rate accurately, then I think we really have to become a bit more open-minded about what might be happening to these workers and to the labor force. Now, I think Larry's point is true, that the idea that we're all going to be working full-time for these gig economy companies, I don't think, I don't know, I'm sure some of the gig economy companies themselves, when they were really in their full hype mode, which some of them are not so much anymore, because they've undergone what's called in Silicon Valley a pivot. Their business model is changing because it wasn't working and the funders were starting to withdraw. So a lot of that hype has disappeared. I think more what we're looking at are workers who are going to, in the future, be working for multiple employers. A worker might have a regular W-2 part-time job working for some small business. They combine that with being an Uber or Lyft driver. Combine that with maybe doing some gigs on TaskRabbit or maybe a second part-time job. Workers have already been working this way in many ways. And I think we're going to see more of that in the future, this kind of multi-employer economy instead of the single employer that we all sort of grew up with in the New Deal era. So I mean, I guess time will tell, really, which kind of workers and what kind of conditions workers are going to be working under. But I don't think we want to sort of wait until we suddenly discover, like I said, 10 years. And I'm like, oh my goodness, this really is a trend that is bigger than we ever realized. The number of discouraged workers working in the gray market has increased according to not only the discrepancy between the unemployment employment rate, but also a lot of the analysis has been done of taxes and how much taxes are being paid and how much consumer spending, what level of consumer spending we have based on the amount of employment that supposedly is out there. Some people have estimated there's a way more spending going on than it would appear to be possible based on the number of workers who are out there. And so there's all these sort of discrepancies that I think people are trying to figure out. So the last thing I would say is that, just to throw out there very quickly, what I think we need to do and what I've proposed in the book is create a safety net for multi-employer workers. And the way to do that would be to create what I call an individual security account for each worker attached to a unique identifier like a social security number. And then every employer would pay into this individual security account a certain amount above the wage, and I used BLS numbers to calculate what that amount would be. It would be about $2 per hour for service sector workers. They would pay a certain amount above the wage into this individual security account prorated to the number of hours that that worker works for that employer. And so if we do this, we would create a safety net. So this worker would now have an individual security account with this money loaded into it. Some of it would automatically go into social security, some would go to Medicare, some would go into healthcare, injured worker compensation, unemployment compensation. So it wouldn't be like this would be money just going into their pocket. It would go into the existing infrastructure we have for safety net for workers that many workers don't get today. And by doing this, we'd get past the discussion of, are they contractors, are they W-2s? In some cases, in terms of the safety net, it wouldn't matter anymore because an employer would pay regardless. Uber, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, whoever they would put money into this individual security account for each worker, that would then go into that worker's safety net. Because right now in the U.S., as I said, if you hire contractors, you get out of 30% of your labor costs. And we have to be concerned about this. It's gonna be a race to the bottom. If more and more employers start using this model in order to have the workers they need. So by doing something like this, this kind of portable benefits, if you will, it would allow us workers to work for whoever they want and not get stuck in job lock working for an employer. They don't like it anymore, but they have a pension there or they have healthcare there. So they just stay with that job. They could take this an affordable way to different employers and be able to still have some degree of safety net. So I think regardless of how we figure out how many workers are becoming gig on-demand workers or not, we know that part-time workers, for example, are subject to things like just-in-time scheduling now where the working conditions are no better than being on call. You don't know what your schedule is from week to week, sometimes even day to day. So in some ways, their working conditions are becoming like gig economy workers where you don't know from day to day what your job is going to be, how many hours you're going to have, you can't plan your life, you can't plan childcare when you don't know what your work schedule is. That's for regularly employed W2 workers and a lot of employers are using other tricks like, well, we give benefits after 30 hours. So then they make sure that all their employees only get 29 hours or fewer. These are the tricks that employers are playing. And so by going to this type of individual security account, multi-employer safety net, which has been used in the construction and trades industries, by the way, for many years, we can get past a lot of that, the things that we argue about now and really get on to some of the other issues like that Larry's been identifying, like job quality and what's happening to wages and all these other things. So throw that out there for more grist for the mill. Well, let me go over quickly some of the data things. So first and foremost, there really are people out there who are saying, we're going to have half the jobs be freelancers. And MBO, which has a special interest, I guess, projects into the future based on, I don't know what, you know, some huge growth. The Freelancers Union, people like Andy Stern, there's a lot of people selling, we're all going to be gig workers. So what do we know about the data? So what you said about Larry Katz, let's just reflect on that. He's basically saying there's a lot of people with regular jobs who aren't reporting their part-time gig jobs, which is exactly my point. There's not a lot of evidence for a lot of full-time gig work. So maybe a lot of part-time gig work, but there's always been a lot of part-time gig work. I have looked at the same data that Larry has looked at at Schedule C in 1099, and I can tell you there's nothing there. I can tell you that we can know, I've been urging the Treasury Department, which actually has everybody's 1099s and everybody's W-2s to actually look at this. We can actually know the whole scale of the 1099 economy. We can know how many 1099s each individual reports and whether they have W-2 income in addition, or what is the size of their 1099 income relative to their total income. And so it's very knowable, but there's no reason to believe that there's a huge number of people working full-time gig jobs that we don't know about. Now I've looked at this Zen payroll thing yesterday, and all they report is the share of workers that have 1099s relative to the share that are full-time. And on their website they say there's 10 million 1099 workers. Well, that's not huge, right? I mean, because a lot of the 1099 workers are also not gonna be full-time. So that's what I'm saying. Every time I look for the journalists who are writing the articles talking about this stuff, it just implodes. And, okay, last, there's nothing I'm saying to suggest that we don't need to think about enforcing the laws or addressing gig workers or addressing the policies. And we can talk more about your policy proposal, which I think is a good thing. And it reflects in a sense what Damon Silvers from the AFL-CIO says. You know, the labor movement for years has been dealing with gig work, actors' equity, screen actors' guild, building trades. There's a lot of work where people go from employer to employer and you can find a way to have health and welfare funds that are based on what hours you work or et cetera. So I think that's all positive. But I'll just point out that that is still gonna confront the problem of we still have to define who's in and who's out, who's really a gig worker who's not. And that's not as easy as the discussion in the book or even here is because you have to know who's, who can contribute into a fund and who can. And it also raises the question, because I agree with you that part-time workers are terribly exploited. So we can't do something that's just for the gig workers. We need to do something for all workers. And this really is about a mandated social insurance system, which is basically social democracy. And I'm all for that. That's not an endorsement of any particular candidate, by the way. So, but that's true. And we have, but last thing on the policy front, we have a tremendous, what we need is a pension system, which is mobile across jobs, where every employer and employee puts into it, where you have it in any job that provides you a benefit that you can't outlive. And that maybe we could even index that benefit to the cost of living. And we can call it social security. And maybe we should build on that, which you suggest at one point, but I'm just saying that I'm all for mobile pension funds, especially defined benefit ones. Thank you both very much. We're going to, I'm gonna ask a couple of questions, and then we have a microphone set up somewhere there that Liz has. I would like to go a little bit deeper into what counts as a gig. Oh, and to Larry, to answer your question of why, is it so hyped? I think there are a couple things that one came up and I was reporting on it. Someone pointed out that the people right about the gig economy live in San Francisco and New York and Washington, D.C. And they use Uber and they use all these things. But maybe one reason that it's gotten traction is because even if you don't live in one of those places, you probably have a cell phone, you know, a smartphone and you're exposed to apps and it makes sense. And you know, maybe you live in the middle of the country, but you took a trip to San Francisco and you stayed in Airbnb because it was much cheaper. You know, so I think people are familiar with it. So that's why it lands. You know, when people talk about it, even if they don't see the data there, they might say, well, that makes sense. I could do Airbnb this year, whereas I couldn't have done it two years ago. But yes, sure, journalists are always causing trouble in reporting things. Well, some speak truth to power. But that's one explanation. And I think, you know, until we have more actual data and until we can kind of connect all these dots that you mentioned and, you know, retail sales being higher than, you know, the employment statistics would indicate, I think it's gonna be really hard to get a good picture on that. And, you know, then we get to this question of what counts as a gig. And, you know, I was thinking when I was learning more about the gig economy, you know, people try to make a distinction between Uber or Airbnb. I mean, Airbnb are kind of passively renting an asset. You know, and then when you think about TaskRabbit versus something like Hourly Nerd, Hourly Nerd is a site where if you have an MBA or some kind of advanced degree, that a skill is, you know, a credential that's relatively more costly to procure. You can also sell those skills for a higher rate, like what's 60, $100 an hour or something like that versus what can work out to much less on TaskRabbit. And so it seems like, you know, what counts as a gig with the independent security account apply to if you're making like $300 a night renting something out in Airbnb and all you did was vacuum and change the sheets, you know, which took an hour or something like that. You know, would it apply for these Hourly Nerd people? Because it seems like there's the potential for people with existing assets, you know, to earn much higher returns through these, you know, new websites. But so can you talk a little more how we define what counts as a gig and the language around it and why it matters? Well, the traditional, traditional, you know, two years old definition of gig has to, it's what they call peer-to-peer. So it's, you know, you directly providing me a service or a good and there's no, nothing in between. There's no store, there's no company. That's where the term originally was peer-to-peer and then it became sharing. The people wanted to put a nice fuzzy warm gloss on it. You know, peer-to-peer sounds kind of wonky. Well, let's call it sharing. You sharing with me, your house, your car, your drill that you don't need on SnapGoods. You know, there's all these companies that sprung up to, became the Uber of X as they call it, you know, for wine. Somebody who makes their own wine, they can sell it to you without going through a retailer. So that was really, you know, what was, they felt was new and different about it. And it was new and different. I mean, you know, companies like Etsy, which allows crafts people to sell their goods to people without having to go to a middle person or a store. I think, you know, some of these are really trying to do a sharing thing. There's companies like Yertle, which was started by Adam Werbach, used to be the director of Sierra Club, where you can go online and put your stuff on and try to swap it with other people's stuff and they even have their own currency on the website. So there's some who are trying to use this technology and it's sort of a sharing way. But when you start talking about Uber and Airbnb and Lyft, suddenly the venture capital enters in and there's a lot of money involved and a lot of profit at stake. So that is kind of really turned. Where do we draw the line for how we're gonna apply an independent savings account type of policy to people? Well, so, I mean, I've been talking about in terms of hourly wage, but an Uber driver doesn't really get an hourly wage. The Uber does have a way where they somehow convert how drivers get paid into an hourly wage. I don't know what formula they use, but drivers are getting paid by the mile, Airbnb getting paid just by the night. So those ones, you'd have to do it by earnings and you'd have to have some way of taking the earnings and comparing that to within that industry or occupation that you can convert that into how much per hour the employer's gonna have to contribute based on the earnings rather than the exact hourly wage. But I don't see that that would be a huge barrier. I mean, they were. You know, I think one of the confusions is that people are selling this share and they lump a lot of things together. And as you said, Airbnb and Uber are different. Airbnb is not providing jobs. Right? They're either renting an asset. You're, you know- Well, it's a job too. Okay, but that's an- But it's not how the BLS defines a job for sure. Well, and you know, if you sell something on eBay, that's not a job. I mean, you are selling your asset. And maybe Airbnb is, you know, not exactly that. But the question is, you know, if you're thinking about the job impact, we probably need to be more specific about, you know, who's in the gig economy or gig jobs and Airbnb and Uber may not be in the same space. And Etsy may not be in the same space. That's all. In my proposal, I wouldn't just apply it to gig workers. I'd apply it to part-timers who are regularly employed. You know, you can even apply it to full-timers. There's a lot of full-time workers, say, who don't have a safety net and aren't getting that from their employer anymore. So I think, you know, we're reaching a point where, I think as a society- Amen, we agree. Yeah, it's basically creating a legal parity between all these different classifications of workers. So that, and you don't treat the other, these other classes less well than you treat regularly employed full-time employees. I mean, this is how, you know, many countries in Europe, Canada and others already do it. So in some ways we're already, we're just an outlier. This is what other places are already doing. I'm gonna ask one more question about the role of the consumer. You said that the gig economy early on, you said it's being sold to us the way 401ks were being sold to us earlier. So, but we're obviously buying it, right? Like there are lots of people using Airbnb and lots of people using Uber. What is the role of the consumer here? Should we be boycotting Uber because they don't pay their workers fairly? Should we not do Airbnb because they're not paying taxes? So maybe you could talk about that. And actually, that was something I learned in your book, the tax issue. And if I'm not mistaken, you kind of document tax evasion by some of these companies. I was made, the lawyers for my publisher maybe take the word evasion out. Okay, sure. Tax avoidance. Avoidance, okay. Can you talk a little bit about, Larry says to enforce existing laws, what laws do you think they're avoiding? And can you also talk about how consumers should be responding? Should we be telling the company? Should we be writing into the companies? Should we be avoiding them? How can those government, consumer, buyer seller, how should those be interacting? Sure. Well, in terms of Airbnb, hotels in most cities pay some sort of hotel tax, business and occupancy tax, there's different names for it, but they pay a tax for every person that stays in their room. And that's an important source of income for local government. Airbnb and the host by and large don't pay that at all. They have begun paying it in a few cities after a lot of political pressure. So cities, all these other cities are losing out on this revenue to the extent that people are staying with Airbnb instead of with hotels. So that's one example of the tax issue. When it comes to Uber and Lyft and ride sharing, taxi companies also pay what's called a livery tax that Uber and Lyft don't pay and they don't ask their drivers to pay. These companies are paying tax on the income they're generating and drivers are supposed to. They're 1099 workers, whether or not they report, no one knows. But there's other issues too around, in terms of Airbnb, no one inspects anyone's house for safety. I sort of somewhat comically, I decided to test Airbnb. I became a host and so I went online and I took some photos of my house and 15 minutes I was live as a host. Cause I saw this interview with Brian Chesky who's the CEO of Airbnb with Katie Cork and he was saying, we have over 100 people dedicated to safety and fire and there's all these ways that we verify our hosts and blah, blah, blah. So I just went on like, wow, 15 minutes I'm live and there was no contact from any human being, no verification of anything I was live. And then he said, we also, she said, well, what about inspecting for fire? He said, well, that's kind of the old 19th century. A lot of these laws are 19th, 20th century laws and what we do is we provide a free smoking and carbon monoxide alarm to all of our hosts. So I went online and I was like, well, I'll get my free smoking carbon monoxide. And they sent me back an email. Well, to get this, you have to go to this webpage, you go to the webpage and make a long story short. It didn't exist. They give you a, they send you a card where you can write safety routes for how to get out, people get out of your house if your house is on fire. And, you know, and there have been issues in San Francisco where, you know, buildings where you had families that used to live in there have now all been evicted and they're just, you know, you can see the Airbnb lockbox hanging on the banister out front. People just come in. How should consumers respond? I mean, that does sound, you know, chilling to know that you're a part of it. But, you know, it's hard to ask consumers to boycott these things. It would be hard to organize it for one, though there are people who have organized a Uber boycott telling people to go to Lyft instead, because, well, because Uber, you know, is a bit more odious. It's CEO Travis Kalnick is, you know, he was asked by Vanity Fair, you know, wow, you're a billionaire now and you, you know, you have all these, looks like all these women that are track, you know, going after you. And he said, yeah, we call that Boober, you know. This is the type of CEO that has put his stamp on his company. And so it's just kind of there's a crassness there to Uber. They've done things like threatened journalists who have written articles against them. They've threatened to dig up dirt on them. They've used their technology to track people. And they're, you know, for all of ride sharing, these drivers are not really insured. You're supposed to have commercial insurance. You know, your Pizza Hut driver doesn't have, it has insurance from door to end to end, but an Uber driver doesn't have commercial insurance and their personal insurance doesn't cover their use of their car for commercial purposes. They still make money if they pay, if they paid all their taxes and abided by all the rules. Could they still make money? That's a big question. I know one knows, you know, if these companies were following the same laws and rules of their competitors and still making money, you could say they're adding value. But when they're not, it's really hard to say. I mean, in June, it was reported that Uber lost $470 million. But you know, they're spending a lot because they're trying to get market share. How would they pay their ISA contribution? Or maybe we can leave that for another time. I mean. Whenever they pay to the driver, some share of it could just go to a fund that provides benefits. So for consumers, I think you have to use your judgment, whether to use Lyft or Uber. There are some serious problems with these companies and what they're doing and they're not paying their taxes, they're not following laws that their competitors are following. It's just that simple. All right. And we'll take questions from the audience. Liz has the microphone. Okay. Is this working again? I don't think so. I can hear it. I got a lot out of all of the presentations, but I think it would help if we put this discussion in the context of David Wiles, the Fishered Workplace. Because the basic point is that employers are trying to evade the responsibility of being employers. And the way they're doing that is they're disaggregating workplaces and disaggregating work. And so the gig economy is one aspect of the way that they're disaggregating the work organization and the work. And so I think the individual security account that you talked about is one reasonable response to that effort by employers to get away from being employers because they would still have to pay into a fund even though they're not saying that they're employing workers. But there's another aspect to what David Wiles was talking about, which is that when you disaggregate work and work organizations, you create all kinds of holes. And he used the example of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as an example where the parceling out of the work to different contracting companies led to a gap where the work organization didn't function effectively. And I think that that's- Is there a question for the panelists? Well, I guess. No, I don't think I have a question. I just think that the discussion needs to be a little broader. broader. Thank you. I'm just gonna go to the back. And I'll just say that I think your point is right. It's the disaggregation point is, and I think this is where some people are concerned, I don't go too much into the robot thing, but that the ability of artificial intelligence going, maybe not today at this moment, to take a job and break it down into component parts and then take certain parts and give that part to automation, give that part to another piece of automation and then the human's role will be left to just hit a button to start the automation. That's what a lot of people are concerned about, that this ability to take a job apart really, now maybe it'll create new jobs, but which is what the technology in the past has done, but the concern and what many top technologists, and I'm not one of them, I'm reporting on these things, what they're saying is that not this time that the ability of these algorithms to do things that humans always are able to do and now we won't have to do, will be unprecedented. And this is that Oxford University study, it said 47% of US jobs will be eliminated over the next 20 years, and that's of course controversial. They didn't say they said potentially eliminated. Well, okay, potentially. I mean, it's just like 100% of people are potentially gonna be billionaires. Next question. Great, Ramzi Alwyn with the National Council on Aging. Thanks for your analysis. I wanted to get your reflections on another trend. In the aging community, this gig economy, there's quite a buzz that it provides two solutions. Potentially you have 78 million baby boomers aging with limited savings in need of part-time flex gigs. Then you also have older, older adults that need services like Uber or Airbnb might be a way to supplement income as well or engage and have some social connections. If you look at the White House Conference on Aging this past summer, the gig economy and the apps, they seem to be presented as silver bullets to both help with the economic needs of older adults and provide services to older and frailer that need access to transportation, home delivered meals, et cetera. So I was curious to get your reflections on sort of those economic demographic trends. Some call it the silver tsunami and the role a gig economy could play. Oh, can I add one thing to that? I mean, people often talk about telework as a way around people having to pay the high cost of living in a city like New York or DC. And this also seems like for people regardless of age who don't live in a big metropolitan area to get work but still live in a place that had a lower cost of living. I've read some of these articles about how seniors might be able to take advantage of it and if they can, I think that's great. It doesn't change that in many places where these companies are operating, it's against all the laws. And I mean, if a senior wants to rent out their home, why rent it to a tourist rather than to a local person who needs a place to live full-time? Again, these technologies are pitting the needs of local people versus tourists. And some cities, that's not such an issue. There's not a housing crisis already. But in other cities, particularly the bigger cities, New York, San Francisco, LA and what have you, there's already an existing housing crisis and then this service comes along and makes that crisis even worse. I mean, in San Francisco, you have a vacancy rate of about 2%, maybe a few thousand housing units across the city. Airbnb has, depending on whose numbers you use, six, seven, 8,000 units that are being let out on Airbnb. So there goes your vacancies right there. So this is the big challenge. And if someone can do part-time work for Uber, driving a senior, great. But why shouldn't Uber also pay into a safety net for that senior? I just, I think we have to get past this idea of like, well, it's working for me. It seems convenient because there are downsides to that convenience. There are clashes of conveniences going on here. Yes, there's more Uber drivers, but that leads to more congestion. Uber is trying to put forward a service now called Uber Pool, where they'll allow car pooling and you can pick up people along the way. Well, that seems like a good thing, except think about this. The way a public transit system works is you have profitable lines with a lot of people to use, and then you have unprofitable lines on the bus system that not as many people use. But to have a comprehensive citywide system, you need to have all of those. So the profitable lines basically subsidize the unprofitable lines in any bus or transit system. Well, if Uber just starts going along the busy lines and starts poaching passengers, it's going to completely undermine your public transit system. So again, that's why I say, well, you have to think of your streets as a public utility and really think about how to incorporate this right-wing. Undeniably, it's adding something valuable that it has potential. It has to be incorporated in a way that's thoughtful and not just Travis Kalinick wanting to flood our street with cars because he's going to make a ton of money and it's convenient for people who can afford it. Next question. Thank you. Great presentation. Marvin Holland, the Transport Workers Union out of New York. I have a two-part question about a lot of questions for you actually touching on transportation. But what I wanted to ask about was this tax avoidance. Has any studies been done on how this may be affecting public services as these taxes are not going into the system? I know in New York, for instance, the taxi, the yellow cabs pay a certain tax for public transit. And then the second part of my question is it looks like Uber may expand to entire New York state and has that been done before where it's just not coming into a city but being expanded into an entire state at once? Well, yeah. I mean, in California, Uber is all over the state. Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, all the ride sharing companies are all over. They didn't start in just one city. So I didn't realize that Uber wasn't all over New York. I'm surprised they're not in Albany because especially since they're always trying to affect politicians and such. And in terms of I'm not aware of any studies that have really studied the impact on cities for loss of revenue as a result of these sharing economy companies not paying taxes. I know in San Francisco, there was a lot of upset for several years because Uber wasn't paying. I mean, Airbnb wasn't paying any local hotel and occupancy tax. And Airbnb resisted it for many years, only when there was enough public outcry and an effort to put a voter initiative on the ballot. Suddenly, Airbnb cost up $25 million. And now, and I should say next Tuesday, San Francisco is voting on Proposition F, which will reign in Airbnb. And the key thing with Airbnb is if the company doesn't give up its data, you cannot tell how many people are Airbnbing, how many nights their guests are staying. You can't figure out how much tax they owe because you don't have the data. And so that's the real crucial thing for any city that tries to regulate Airbnb. You have to have the data in order to regulate it. Without it, I mean, San Francisco now, it's so many loopholes in the law. The law is only six months old. And still, everyone realizes it's not working because we don't have the data. The safety net, as you described it, Steve, leaves something out. Construction workers, actors, workers that have multi-employer plans have it through their unions. It was the unions that fought for them. It was workers getting together through unions that got these plans. My question is this. Doesn't focusing on the Uber economy or the ShareGig economy phrasing it as a whole new thing, coming from outer space or something, doesn't that take away from the fundamental discussions that need to be happening about worker voice on the job, organizing unions? The reason I bring this up is that at the recent White House summit on worker voice, everybody agreed, the problem was we need to solve a lot of the problems we're talking about. We need regulations that encourage and not discourage unions. It was agreed to. Then, three quarters or more of the discussion was about the new economy and what to do about it. And the president says, well, nobody knows. Give me suggestions. So that's my question. No, I think you're right. If this became the sole conversation, and my book's not about, it's about a lot of what's happening in the non-Gig economy and how the gig economy fits into that in the broader, bigger picture. In the chapter where I talk about this individual security account, I talk about how it started in the construction of trades, and it was because of unions that they got that. But the dilemma is, as we all know, the number of workers who are under a union contract is at an all-time low. And it doesn't seem like that's going to increase anytime soon, and maybe not if ever. So what do we do for these workers in the meantime, whether they're gig economy or a part-time W-2 worker who works the 29 hours instead of 30? And so that's where I mean, my previous book, as Larry said when I was introduced, it was about Europe. And looking at other places around the world, they don't have these distinctions between part-timers and full-timers and temps and regular employed. I mean, there are some differences, but they're not as severe as they are here in the US. So I thought, let's close the gap. And the way, instead of having a union management trust that oversees the benefits as these multiple employer plans usually have, that's where I came up with this idea of let's have an individual security account and just have employers pay into it prorated to the number of hours. I mean, if there's another way to do it, I'd love to hear it, but I just haven't been able to find another way to do it. Do you think that could lead to less labor market fluidity, because Europe is not known for its labor market fluidity? I think that's for other reasons. I don't see why that should lead to less labor market, especially if everybody has to do it. If you start having just only some employers doing it, or if you've said, well, let's just let employers. I was at a meeting, four-hour meeting, with a member of Congress and all these Silicon Valley companies a few weeks ago. And surprisingly, they didn't throw me out of the room and talking about this. In fact, there was even interest from some of these employers, because some of them were saying, I wanted to give my employees health care. I wanted to give them money for it. But I was told by my lawyers, if I do that, it'll make me look like an employer instead of a contractor. And then suddenly, I'm going to have lawsuits. They're looking for what's called a safe harbor from all these lawsuits. These startups, we think of them as these big, huge things. But they live in fear of lawsuits, because they're operating at such a low margin. They're spending money as fast as they raise it. And if they get hit with a lawsuit and they lose the VC money that's keeping them alive, runs away. So they're interested in this safe harbor. And so if we offer them, look, OK, you can have safe harbor. But in return, you're going to have to give us a safety net to all the workers you hire. We can't call them employees, because by definition, they're not. All the workers you hire, you have to provide the safety net. That might be the compromise that perhaps could get them to go along. I mean, Larry, you might have some thoughts about any of this? Well, I think the spread of essentially both sectoral and occupational collective bargaining would be a huge advance for this country. Well said. And you've said that the Freelancers Union could possibly represent the interests of people who are working in different sectors. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing that would happen if we did this, is that you would suddenly, so basically the worker would, think about the Affordable Care Act. You have your gold plan, your bronze plan, your silver plan. There would be different plans offering safety nets. Insurance companies would be offering them. But in my conception of it, we would also let NGOs, like unions, offer it, or Freelancers Union. I mean, you'd have to have it all regulated. They have to have a certain minimum standard that all the plans meet. And so you'd be able, as a worker, to go with the money that's in your individual security account, purchase a plan that would provide your safety net from one of these different providers, in other words. Yeah. Yeah. You're running out of time. OK. All right. So no more questions? No more questions. Yeah, there's a few more people who want to ask the questions. All right. Who's next? I think, let's start. Is this on, Danielle? Hi, thanks. Great discussion. I'm wondering, in particular, about how you deal with unemployment insurance under the individual security accounts. I think it's a little more problematic than something for which we have a good model, like, say, social security, that already works. It just needs to be extended to workers that are either misclassified or are participating in the gig economy, where we don't have a way to capture them in the traditional social security framework. But unemployment insurance relies upon, as a major tenant, a worker has to be laid off through no fault of their own. And Uber, for example, to take the prime example, workers can choose when and how much they work, who is to determine whether they're unemployed or partially unemployed. I think UI is critical as a component of our safety net, but it's sort of more confusing about how you would extend that existing framework to these workers. Well, in the multi-employer plans that construction and trades use, for example, you'd have workers who are working three weeks for this employer, a carpenter, for example, three weeks for this employer, six weeks for that one, two months for that one. And they'd have downtime sometimes between jobs, as they're looking for the next job. And they would have unemployment benefits that they could use during those times looking for the next job. They'd have, as a certain point, their unemployment benefits might run out, and then they're out if they haven't found the next job. So I think it would work the same way with these types of workers where you'd have a certain amount paid into this individual security account that would go toward into the unemployment fund in whatever state that usually the unemployment funds are, the jurisdiction is the state plans. And they would have a certain amount of unemployment that they can use for those times when they're unemployed. And once it's out, then it's out. You only get a certain amount, and then you don't have unemployment anymore. But at least it would be better than what they have now, which is nothing for a lot of these workers. I mean, you have to realize that this is a new. I think you're raising the issue, which is, at some point, we have to decide whether people are actually employees and there's employers involved. And you could definitely have, I mean, construction workers get UI. I mean, in addition to all the things you're saying, they pay into the UI system. And they collect benefits. And under the same rules that everybody else does. But there are employees who work for various employers, but the health and welfare funds allow them to generate vacations and pensions and health as a result. I still think we have to decide about that. And by the way, I've been very confused about the argument that somehow Uber occupies something in between an independent contractor and a regular employee player. And I've never actually heard the argument actually made. You mean the dependent contractor, this third category that people are trying to get? Yeah, what is it that distinguishes one versus the other? And why are they not just employees? They seem, to me, to be employees. So I don't understand why they're not and what makes them not, et cetera. So I just think David Wilde had a two-hogen hour administrator issued a guidance around a couple of months ago. And in the guidance, it said, you should imagine that almost everybody actually is an employee, that being an independent contractor is really the exception to the rule. And I think that's true. And so we need people to abide by that and need those laws enforced. And then they would get UI. Yeah, it'd be great. It just seems to not be the direction that the economy is going. No, that's the way laws are enforced. And the other thing that's coming out in this discussion, you've raised it. Is that the incredible sucking up to Silicon Valley and the hype to inflate IPO values seem to me two of the significant things I wasn't fully aware of about why there's so much hype about the gig economy. That's some of my takeaway. It's the usual political sucking up to Silicon Valley who has a lot of money. In fact, isn't Google a big investor in Uber? Yeah. OK, so there's a lot of political campaign contributions there's the wanting to be associated with the future, et cetera. And there's a lot of magazines and reporters who make a living reporting on tech because there's a lot of money there. So it's all part of that same stuff. That's what I've learned. And I don't disagree. I just don't know that wanting it to be differently is going to make it different. I mean, the talk now is about creating this third category of dependent contractor. That's just something that's going to give more lawyers work to figure out the loopholes. We need to call BS on that. But if you just put in a plan like this, you get past all those categories in terms of the safety net. Maybe, maybe, I'm not sure. Because it's just lawyers are having a field day now. You add another category of worker, they're going to look for loopholes around that. I mean, it's just. Well, on that note, I'm Francisco Alvarez from the Roosevelt Institute. I, when you call out some of these startups about their surfing of the labor law waves, a lot of them will respond defensively saying, we're not employer. We are a platform. They'll avoid the word intermediary. They're a tech company. They're a platform. And we invite people to join our platform. But in many instances, they do, I don't want to speak for them, but they operate as an intermediary. And they set the terms for how people can join them. And they can look at how often a worker accepts or declines jobs, or they look at feedback metrics. And that sets the terms for whether someone can continue to be part of their quote unquote platform. So I think that it may come down to lawsuits, just having more lawsuits across the country from people who are, well, from workers who are willing to maybe put their neck on the line and call out these platforms. I'm wondering if you can maybe give us an idea of some of the lawsuits that you're already seeing out there, and what promise do you think that might hold forward hammering out some of these terms and relationships? Thank you. Sure. And I think there's actually a class action lawsuit coming out of Washington, right here out of the city, between workers and postmates. I'm not sure if you've heard about that case. Is that generally how some labor laws get decided and that there's a lot of little lawsuits that eventually legislation has to respond? I mean, one doesn't expect legislation to proactively respond. How does this sequence of how you? I don't see the lawsuits as a great remedy, because they're hugely expensive. They take a long time. And even when you win, you don't necessarily win because they appeal and they will appeal. They've got a ton of money and they've got a ton of lawyers. And there is a class action lawsuit against Uber. I think there's two, actually. There's one against Instacart, postmates. I mean, all of them are pretty much claiming that these are employees. There have been some rulings in California by various bodies saying, for example, they rule that this one particular worker is an employee, but they say this has no bearing on all the other Uber drivers. It's just a very, very slow way to go. And you never really resolve it. I don't know that there's any history of lawsuits leading to major legislation. And let's face it, there's nothing that's going to get through the Republican Congress. You can change behavior. That's what we need. If people who are afraid of lawsuits start treating people who are their employees as employees, that's a thing. So their lawyers tell them, you're on thin ice, get with the program. And so that's the role of, I mean, that's the positive thing about tort lawyers. They're out there trying to make money, trying to force that kind of issue. And so that's the promise. I think that the IRS and the California Treasury Department and the California Worker Comp Bureau and all ought to be aggressive. And if they were, they would help solve this problem. Yeah, that's the nice thing. Like even Jerry Brown, I think, he's been disappointing in his. He could crack down on a lot of this. But he's sort of, you know. Well, we should be writing. Why is that not happening? That's what that's the, why is it? And where is it? I think Democrats are afraid of being on the wrong side of this issue and having sort of the young, urban, leaning, Democrat professionals who like their Uber and like their Airbnb. They're afraid of being on the wrong side. In the US, we're dazzled by technology. I mean, I'm also studying how other countries are dealing with this and I'm going to Germany in January to do more comprehensive study. But they look at Uber and they go, it's a taxi company. I mean, you might be getting your ride through a different means, but it's a taxi company. You're providing the exact same service. We don't care that it has an app. And Uber, by the way, their name is Uber Technologies. They've added that to their name now. And they just say, it's a taxi company. You must follow all the rules of all taxi companies. End of story. Here in the US, we're like, oh, what is it? What is this thing? Is it a technology company? Is it? That's what they say they are. And so there's a cultural thing going on. We're Americans love technology and we're kind of, we don't want to be on the wrong side of history and how these technologies are going to make the world a better place. Well, thank you, guys, both. And thank you, everyone, for coming. Bring your books up for Stephen to sign. Go buy your books. Books up for Stephen to sign. Thank you to Larry. It's a really good read. I just read it very quickly in advance of this panel. And it's a really nice book. Thanks, all of you. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, Larry.