Marty Walsh |
A lot of gig workers in the United States should be classified as “employees” who deserve work benefits, President Biden’s labor secretary said on Thursday.
"We are looking at it but in a lot of cases gig workers should be classified as employees... in some cases they are treated respectfully and in some cases they are not and I think it has to be consistent across the board," Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, a former union member, told Reuters in an interview.
"These companies are making profits and revenue and I'm not (going to) begrudge anyone for that because that's what we are about in America. But we also want to make sure that success trickles down to the worker," he said.
In the wake of the comments, shares of Uber fell as much as 8 percent while Lyft dived as much as 12 percent. Doordash fell nearly 9 percent and Grubhub was down 3.3 percent.
Walsh's comments are frightening.
As many as 55 million people in the United States were gig workers - or 34% of the workforce - in 2017, according to the International Labor Organization, and the total was projected to rise to 43% in 2020. It is probably even higher now given the lockdown shifts in the economy.
So what is going on?
It should be understood that this is not just about the reclassification of workers as employees but a desire to create a bigger pool of workers that can be muscled into unions.
Joe Biden has said, "I want you to know I’m a union guy. Unions are going to have increased power."
He also just signed an executive order creating a task force to promote labor organizing as part of a broader push to strengthen unions.
The task force is led by Vice President Kamala Harris and Walsh.
Keep in mind that all these players are hardcore lefties who promote, at a fundamental crony level, the old-school Marxist view of a struggle between labor and capitalists.
They are going to construct union laws that imply that this struggle exists. In effect, it will push workers to join unions and then provide workers with an incentive to adopt Marxist thinking whereby the government will eventually step in, on a case-by-case basis, to mandate settlements with workers. This will result in even more government influence over corporations.
The workers will become useful idiots drenched in socialist propaganda that will result in more power for the crony power structure elite.
This is pure evil and the ones at the top, setting the new rules, have to know it.
It is extremely destructive to the economy overall.
It is one more example of the fact that Joe Biden is a very bad dude.
I discuss how unions are destructive and result in lowering the overall standard of living in a recent podcast: What Joe Biden Gets Wrong About Unions.
""These companies are making profits and revenue and I'm not (going to) begrudge anyone for that because that's what we are about in America. But we also want to make sure that success trickles down to the worker," he said."
ReplyDelete-- Cognitive dissonance in two sentences. Yes, you're free to make profits, but then we'll tell you how to use them.