The on-demand economy, and how the heck the U.S. should regulate it, is shaping into a pretty hot issue ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. President Barack Obama addressed the topic this week during the White House’s “Summit on Worker Voice.”
The event, designed to promote the WAGE Act and critique the “new economy,” ultimately offered two bits of feedback for startups like Uber: Jobs and tech good, hiring contractors bad.
Here’s Obama’s quote on that specifically [emphasis ours]:
Our culture as a whole started somehow extolling greed is good, instead of, how do we work together to create a good society for everybody. Jobs, as a consequence, began paying less, offering fewer benefits. And in recent years, we’ve seen more companies cut costs by hiring contractors and “permatemps” — workers who are laboring side-by-side with full-time employees but don’t earn the same pay and benefits and job security. That’s a bad phrase — permatemps.
You can view the full transcript of Obama’s speech here, as transcribed by the White House. We’ve quoted a portion of his remarks below, indicating gaps with ellipses. It’s packed with commentary on the ballooning on-demand economy, and his statements may reflect how Democrats will handle the issue going forward.
And that’s true now more than ever, during this time of rapid economic change. In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of American innovation in the workforce. And because of technology, people are empowered and employers are empowered to create value and services in new ways.
We’ve got folks who are getting a paycheck driving for Uber or Lyft; people who are cleaning other people’s houses through Handy, offering their skills on TaskRabbit. And so there’s flexibility and autonomy and opportunity for workers. And millennials love working their phones much quicker than I can. [Laughter] And all this is promising. But if the combination of globalization and automation undermines the capacity of the ordinary worker and the ordinary family to be able to support themselves, if employers are able to use these factors to weaken workers’ voices and give them a take-it-or-leave-it deal in which they don’t have a chance to ever save for the kind of retirement they’re looking for, if we don’t refashion the social compact so that workers are able to be rewarded properly for the labor that they put in — people like Terrence — then we’re going to have problems.
…So we’ve got to make sure that as we continue to move forward, both in this new “on-demand” economy and in the traditional economy as a whole, hard work guarantees some security. And that’s what this summit is about -– making sure that, as our economy continues to evolve, working Americans don’t get lost in the shuffle. They can come together and they can win.
…Now, the economy is changing again. Technology has made it easier for companies to do more with less. They have world markets and the capacity to shift operations along the global supply chain.
Our culture as a whole started somehow extolling greed is good, instead of, how do we work together to create a good society for everybody. Jobs, as a consequence, began paying less, offering fewer benefits. And in recent years, we’ve seen more companies cut costs by hiring contractors and “permatemps” — workers who are laboring side-by-side with full-time employees but don’t earn the same pay and benefits and job security. That’s a bad phrase — permatemps.
… And so, in today’s economy, we should be making it easier, not harder, for folks to join a union. We should be strengthening our labor laws, not rolling them back. (Applause.) And for contractors or workers who can’t join unions, we should be finding new avenues for them to join together and advocate for themselves as well.
… So we’ve got to look for new tools to bring people together, because in today’s economy, it’s not always going to be a situation where you just have one plants and one worker and one organizing drive; it’s going to be workers who are not always on a single site. And we’ve got to find ways to make sure that they can express their solidarity in new ways. And that’s where technology actually can help in the same ways that in the past sometimes it’s hindered.
… So we’re here today to think about where do we go next. We’ve got to ask ourselves: What does the next generation of American jobs look like? How do we make sure those jobs reward hard work? At a time of shrinking union membership, but a growing number of digital tools for organizing, how do we make sure everyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead?
… So I’m sure there are going to be a lot of ideas coming out of these discussions, but these are the guideposts that we need to stay focused on: Good pay; benefits; workplace safety; work-family balance; skills training; the freedom to organize. That’s what unions secured for us. That’s what we have to secure for the next generation of workers.
