Gig workers and platforms battle over wages and rights

Author

Moshe Ohana
March 18, 2024

What's inside:

The Markets

Tech layoffs hit 50K, on track for over 200K in 2024

Popular tech layoff tracking website, Layoffs.fyi, has officially tracked over 50,000 tech layoffs so far in 2024. If this trend continues, we could see around 240K tech layoffs by the end of 2024, just missing 2023’s 263K total.

One of the companies to push us over the 50K mark was Blueboard, an employee recognition and rewards platform that now boasts the following message on every page on its website:

Thanks to the internet, we have access to this archives page (from 2019) which offers us access to the now defunct website and company.

Co-founders Kevin Yip and Taylor Smith founded Bluedboard in 2014. According to Kevin’s LinkedIn profile, Blueboard “… helps companies like GoPro, Google, Pinterest, Otis Elevators, and Abbott Labs reward their employees with memorable and meaningful experiences - think skydiving for the first time, going to your first World Series game, or learning how to perform stand up comedy”.

According to this article from Friday, March 15, 2024, Blueboard sent an email to their users saying they are ceasing operations and won’t be able to deliver any services going forward. They also said they’ve been trying to raise money for many months unsuccessfully.

This company shutdown comes just over 3 years after a $9.3 million Series A round in 2020.

We need to ask if the business itself was flawed or if this was simply the result of a poorly managed business. 

Around the world

Uber drivers strike in Portugal

On February 20, 2024, hundreds of Bolt and Uber drivers went on strike in Lisbon and Porto. There is another strike scheduled for March 22, 2024 also in Portugal that is expected to attract even more drivers than the February strike.

Organized via Whatsapp by Hans Melo and others, this is expected to be the biggest strike of its kind ever in Portugal. Drivers will not deliver food for 6 hours in the evening in the hopes that this demonstration garners the attention of lawmakers, users of the apps, and the apps themselves. These workers are claiming they need to work 12-16 hour days to earn an acceptable salary and that equipment (backpacks, coats, proper shoes etc) to get the work done is not being provided by the apps and is instead coming out of the pockets of the workers.

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In the US, lawmakers have implemented minimum wages and other benefits for gig workers in New York state and Washington state over the past couple of years. Most recently, the city of Minneapolis, passed legislation implementing minimum wages for rideshare drivers.

Uber and Lyft have now threatened to leave Minneapolis on May 1 because of this new legislation. They claim the legislation is going to put thousands of drivers out of work and thousands of riders stranded. The drivers are confident, however, that Uber and Lyft will not pull out of their city just like they didn’t pull out of NYC after it passed a similar law. 

AI @ Work

Slack studies how AI is leveraged at work

On March 6th, Slack published survey results of a January 2024 study they did in which they surveyed over 10,000 desk workers across the US, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the UK.

Slack was trying to quantify new trends in AI use at work. So what were the results?

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Notably, according to the survey, “1 in 4 desk workers reporting they have tried AI tools for work as of January 2024, compared with 1 in 5 as of September 2023”. 80% of those who are using AI report it is improving productivity.

So, why aren’t more employees using AI at work? Slack reports that 43% of survey respondents say they haven’t been provided with any guidance from managements on how AI should be used in the workplace. And why is management so hesitant to release guidance? The top two responses were data security and privacy & AI reliability and accuracy.

Personally, I use AI at work every day. We’ve implemented Glean to help employees quickly search all tools and systems that teams are working with. Glean works with customers such as Databricks, Greenhouse, & Plaid to help their teams be more productive at work. 

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