The ministerial declaration invites the OECD to further develop its work related to the digital economy, building on its strategies on skills and jobs. It declares it will ‘spur the employment opportunities created by the digital economy by…adapting labour policies and programmes to foster job quality and social protection, in particular in new work arrangements facilitated by digital technologies, and by continuing to address job displacement and mitigate the related social cost especially for vulnerable groups’.
During the OECD ministerial and the related Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) forum on “Sustainable & Inclusive Innovation: Quality Jobs and Skills in the Digital Economy”, the ITF and its member unions affirmed their support for technological advances in the transport industry which benefit workers but warned against digital innovations aimed at undermining workers’ individual and collective rights.
Bhairavi Desai, executive director of ITF union the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said: “The Wall Street-financed Uber business model – Ubernomics – is predicated on destroying a full-time profession and replacing it with temporary, below minimum-wage ‘gig work’. This is made allowable by the misclassification of workers as independent contractors – workers without the most basic labor protections.
“Governments charged with job creation should not be offering political favor to digital companies like Uber, which no longer calls working for it a job. If you want to know why employee status matters, ask an independent contractor.”
ITF legal adviser Ruwan Subasinghe added that forced labour in Chinese ‘online gold mining’ operations showed the digital economy was not immune to abuses of workers’ fundamental rights. He criticised venture capital investments in companies like Uber and Didi Chuxing, which deliberately lose millions of dollars to increase their market share and deny drivers collective bargaining rights by misclassifying workers. He argued that Uber’s dominant market position needed to be looked at from a competition law perspective.
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