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Bernie Sanders: Rideshare drivers deserve better pay and better job protections
By Bernie Sanders : May 8, 2019 10:45 a.m.
Excerpts:
We can no longer accept a situation in which a tiny handful of Americans become extraordinarily wealthy by paying their workers starvation wages. Today, the median worker at these ride-sharing companies makes $8.55 an hour. And yet in 2017, Lyft’s CEO made more than $41 million and Uber’s CEO was paid $45 million last year. Additionally, Uber executives this week are expected to become instant millionaires from the company’s multibillion-dollar-initial-public offering on Wall Street. In the world’s wealthiest nation, we must take a stand: We must declare that people who work for multibillion-dollar companies should not have to work 70 or 80 hours a week to get by.
And yet we must also understand that these workers are not merely being poorly paid, like so many other workers in America. These so-called “gig economy” workers are also being denied basic workplace protections and a fighting chance to obtain higher wages. That is because they are among the nearly 16 million workers who are paid as “independent contractors,” even though they are working full time.
And now, shock of all shocks, Donald Trump — the man who campaigned as a champion of workers — is actively helping the companies rip off the workers.
Trump’s administration not only rescinded previous rules designed to classify gig economy workers as full time employees, his Labor Department just this past week issued a “get out of jail free card” to employers such as Uber and Lyft to let them keep classifying their workers as “independent contractors.” That makes it harder for these workers to join unions, and harder for workers to sue when they are being fleeced.
These rulings are a threat to all workers in America — and they must be reversed.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Open-Forum-Rideshare-drivers-deserve-better-pay-13828990.php
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