Some Good News

There has been some good news over the last couple of days:

"Republican law limiting labor powers defeated in Missouri." Voters in Missouri walloped by a 2-to-1 margin a Republican scheme to make the state right-to-work. Evidence, I believe, that people at root know what's in their best interest.

From NYT's "Thursday Briefing" news that the gig economy has peaked --

A big blow to Uber and Lyft

• New York is the first major American city to halt new vehicle licenses for ride-hailing services and to set a minimum pay rate for drivers. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, said the measures passed on Wednesday would reduce traffic and improve drivers’ low wages. Uber warned that the cap could result in higher prices and longer waits. 

• The legislation, our columnist writes, “suggests the extent to which the false promises of the sharing economy are becoming better understood and, how much more aggressively they still could be counteracted.”

Plus, the story from Tuesday that hints our social media fever might be breaking -- "Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak."

Tuesaday's elections revealed some huge vulnerabilities for the GOP going into the November general election. The special election in Ohio's 12th CD is case in point. Rural turnout was down while turnout in the tony suburbs was up, which led to the "too close to call" status of the race two days after election day -- in a district that Trump won by 11 points in 2016. Democrats could just about guarantee control of the House if only Nancy Pelosi would stand down from leadership. Republicans are running against Pelosi in all districts that appear to be in play.

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.

Mainstream Wins in Austria, But for How Much Longer?

When all the absentee ballots were tallied yesterday, Austria ended up electing the pro-European presidential candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, over the ultra-nationalist Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer. It was close: 50.3% for Van der Bellen, compared to 49.7% for Hofer.

Like the National Front's performance in France's regional elections in December, Austria's Freedom Party wasn't able to follow up an impressive first-round showing by closing the deal with the voters in the final round. The mainstream media shields the status quo and is able to provide the margin of victory in close elections, as Alison Smale hints in "Austrian Far-Right Candidate Norbert Hofer Narrowly Loses Presidential Vote":

The parties of the center left and center right that governed for most of the past 30 years in ever-duller grand coalitions were trounced in the first round of the presidential elections last month, when Mr. Hofer stunned rivals by reaping 35.1 percent, well ahead of Mr. Van der Bellen with 21 percent. 

Sunday’s runoff turned into a cliffhanger as the popular vote was counted and showed an ever-narrowing lead for Mr. Hofer. The Austrian public broadcaster ORF projected that Mr. Van der Bellen would win by just 3,000 votes when the record number of requested mail-in ballots was counted on Monday. 

That projection — and the tone of some of the ORF reporting on the election — was heavily criticized by the Freedom Party. It was not clear if there would be legal consequences, but the party’s attitude illustrated the country’s deep divisions.

The same dynamic is discernible in the campaign against Brexit. Fear of the unknown is amplified. The specter of capital flight is sketched. The Leavers are cast as callous capitalist Bentley-driving playboy real estate moguls (Brit mini-Trumps). But nowhere is heard a sonorous call for a united Europe. Best to avoid the topic of what the European Union actually stands for. The European Dream that was peddled in the aughts turned out to be a grift. There must be a rupture, as Stathis Kouvelakis explains in "What’s Next for Nuit Debout?":

I also believe at a more programmatic level that this is the challenge we’re confronted with at the current moment: we cannot settle for an anti-neoliberal platform listing a set of immediate demands — in reality, a trade unionist–like program. What we need is a real political alternative, identifying the points knotting together the current situation and the class adversary’s own strategy. 

That means, for example, that we must absolutely aim at the end of presidentialism and of the Fifth Republic, but also at the dismantling of the European Union, which is capital’s genuine war machine at the continent-wide scale. Without a rupture with the EU we will never arrive at any solution, as the disaster of Syriza in Greece definitively confirmed.

Bernie Sanders must take his campaign all the way to Philadelphia, and we need a Chicago-'68 type of eye-opener there.

We're at a 50-50 split in the West. Corporate domination of the media adds weight to the status quo half creating the illusion of a majority.

But it can't last too much longer. The status quo isn't anywhere near granting even the smallest "trade unionist–like program" of reform that might buy the rulers a little wiggle room. The direction we are headed promises even more wars, more refugees and less stable employment. The economy coming our way is the gig economy where we compete with robots to do piece work organized by a smart phone app.

We might not be there yet in 2016, but the revolution, some kind of major upheaval, is coming.