Some Thoughts on the Gig Economy and Autonomous Vehicles

A nasty piece of work was in the office last week. There was a telephone interview scheduled with one of the U.S. senators representing the state. The nasty piece of work announced herself as the campaign manager for the senator. While we were waiting for the senator to call in from Washington D.C. (at which time I would put the call on hold and walk over to the board room where various union reps were seated around a large conference table and pick up the line and put it on speaker) I chatted with the campaign manager.

I do a lot of this. I call it "fluffing." Judges, state representatives, candidates for lands commissioner and superintendent for public instruction, etc., come into the office to be interviewed for an endorsement and they sit and wait in a little area near my desk.

The conversation is about the climate, both political and meteorological. There has been a lot discussion about the unusually warm spring we have had in the Pacific Northwest. I have lived here for nearly 25 years, and I have never been through an April as sunny and hot as the one that just passed.

Most of the talk is about the volatile political shift underway. Trump is on the rise and Hillary is a smelly corpse, but the pols just cluck and smile and act as if everything will snap back to the same old, same old after the fall.

With the campaign manager I disagreed politely. I said Trump's appeal was understandable. He was lying through his teeth; but people are scared and willing to be seduced because everything is turned upside down. Look at the gig economy and the rapidly approaching fleet of autonomous vehicles, said I. People don't see a future for themselves.

The campaign manager poo-pooed me. She said all those stories about self-driving cars and fleets of robot tractor trailers were merely public relations fodder for the business pages. She alleged that the tech wasn't even in the beta stage. Besides, she said, even if it were true, labor could rely on stalwart friends like the senator (who voted for every free-trade agreement to jostle down the sluice) to protect our jobs.

That left me speechless.

A must-read story by Mike Isaac and Neal Boudette, "Automakers Befriend Start-Ups Like Uber, Girding Against a Changing Car Culture," appeared today, and I wish I could forward it to the campaign manager, particularly this handy synopsis of the huge investments and partnerships presently being formed between the tech and auto giants.

In January, General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft, the ride-hailing app popular with American users, with a focus on developing networks of autonomous vehicles. Ford Motor is making over its Dearborn, Mich., headquarters into a Silicon Valley-like campus of green buildings connected by self-driving shuttles. 

And a few weeks ago, Fiat Chrysler and Google agreed to produce a test fleet of driverless minivans. Both BMW and Mercedes-Benz have started to pilot ride services. 

Even other technology companies only tangentially related to automobiles are becoming more involved in ride services. Apple, which is working on its own autos project, said this month it had invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing company that competes fiercely with Uber.

The scale of ride-hailing as a phenomenon is encapsulated in China. Uber operates in more than 30 Chinese cities with plans to expand to 100 by the end of the year. Didi is in well over 300 cities and towns throughout the country. 

Last June, Uber said it had approximately 20,000 regular drivers in the Chinese city of Chengdu alone, on par with the approximately 22,000 drivers in San Francisco and 26,000 in New York at the time.

The gig economy is here to stay. Next, sooner than most think or care to contemplate, the labor component of the gig economy will be swapped out by machines.

But a contradiction at the heart of the gig-to-robot revolution is few will earn enough money to actually buy an automobile. Fordism meant paying the worker on the assembly line enough money to purchase the product he was helping to produce. This ends with gig-to-robot.

Don't the captains of industry see this? How can you maintain growth when the workforce is constantly shrinking? Maybe the answer is that low growth/no growth is no longer a problem if the super-rich keep gobbling down a greater chunk of the pie. This has certainly been the situation post-Lehman.

Trump Can't Win + Self-Driving Cabs Coming to a City Near You

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the duopoly's presumed nominees, the best that we can hope for -- some sort of crash on the way to the coronation -- appears to be unfolding.

Trump is facing a row of very high hurdles. While RNC head Reince Priebus pledged fealty to the billionaire television phenom, GOP speaker of the house Paul Ryan has not. Ryan is the darling of the well-heeled funders of the Republican Party as well as an ideological fountainhead of what stands for conservative orthodoxy today. His refusal to back Trump is a sign that GOP paymasters are unwilling to climb aboard the "Make America Great Again" bandwagon and accept a reworking of Republican orthodoxy. This is very bad for Trump, who cannot or will not self-fund a general election with a $1 billion price tag.

The Bushes refuse to attend the GOP convention in Cleveland, as do the last two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain. But there will be plenty of protesters. I got to see up close how this anti-Trump mobilization works. One of the big unions, say SEIU, gets a hint that Trump is coming to town. The central labor council is alerted. Resounding statements of resistance are communicated to the local press; members are told when and where to protest; and so on. There will be plenty of this in Cleveland.

To my mind the only question is how badly does Trump lose. Ten points? Probably not by that much. If Obama beat McCain by seven points in the popular vote in 2008, it is hard to imagine the cadaverous Clinton doing any better. On the other hand, if the GOP does split and possibly attempt a third-party campaign in key states, it could be a ten-point margin. How this impacts the Republican down-ticket is anybody's guess at this point.

For the Democrats, Hillary does just fine when she is out of the limelight. Bernie beat her in Indiana last week and he is going to beat in West Virginia tomorrow and in Oregon next week. But Clinton will be able to turn things around in New Jersey and California, concluding the primary season with a show of strength. One would hope that the anti-Hillary protests in Philadelphia will be as large as the anti-Trump rallies in Cleveland, but I doubt this will be the case.

So Hillary triumphs against Trump. The bigger issue though is the world around us. The neoliberal paradigm that has dominated the social sphere the last 40 years is falling apart. The main effort to keep it intact is a reboot of the Cold War. Both Russia and China are being engaged.

The New Cold War proceeds absent any public approval, as do combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (countries where the U.S. is officially not in combat).

Perpetual war conducted in silence.

The biggest story I read over the weekend though was not about Trump or Afghanistan; it was about a driverless cab service premiering as soon as next year in an unnamed U.S. city. According to Neal Boudette and Mike Isaac in "Head of Fiat Chrysler Sees Self-Driving Cars in Five Years, Not 20":

General Motors and Lyft, the ride-hailing start-up valued at $4.5 billion, intend to test a fleet of self-driving taxis in an American city as soon as within a year, according to a person who has been briefed on the two companies’ plans. That would most likely begin using the technology inside the battery-powered Chevrolet Bolt, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about unannounced initiatives. 

G.M. and Lyft formed a partnership in January and said they planned to introduce “an on-demand autonomous network” of self-driving vehicles. A spokesman from G.M. and a Lyft spokeswoman declined to offer additional details about their plans. 

News of the taxi tests was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

I have heard that more American workers are employed in driving-related jobs than any other type of work. Can you see the way forward for a zombie neoliberalism? Cold wars with China and Russia and robots doing the work at home. Doesn't seem too stable to me.