‘Critical infrastructure’ has come to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. Could the invisibilized work of people who provide essential services as part of this systemically important infrastructure become more visible in turn? And if so, could this present an unexpected opportunity for labor struggles? In her two-part SILENT WORKS essay, San Francisco-based urban researcher Katja Schwaller explores these questions, focusing in particular on the social spheres where Big Tech is expanding into the public sector. A tour of the dark side of Silicon Valley.
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Orange smoke rises into the sky. E-scooters from the startups Lime and Bird are piled up to block a Google bus. Activists in hazmat suits and N95 masks unfurl banners at a busy intersection in San Francisco. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we might have gotten used to the sight of such protective gear. But the protest didn’t take place in the calamitous year of 2020. It took place back in the spring of 2018, long before the cityscape was dominated by masked figures scurrying by boarded-up storefronts, and before N95 masks became a sought-after rarity.
I’d like to use this protest as an opportunity to reflect on the structural conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they have come to light over the past few months here in the Bay Area – a stronghold of disruptive industries and Silicon Valley ideology. For as the protest’s aesthetics make clear, the foundations for toxic conditions of exploitation were laid long before the pandemic. In fact, privatization of critical infrastructure, precarious working conditions, corporate appropriation of urban space, and the dismantling of unionized sectors are the very cornerstones of many business models of locally based tech companies.
„Techsploitation is toxic“
This, in turn, creates conditions that greatly facilitate the spread of the novel coronavirus – and, in particular, the highly unequal social impacts of the pandemic. After all: “Techsploitation is toxic,” as the activists’ banners proclaim, “from the sweatshop to the gig economy to the e-waste dump.” The protest – one of many ‘Google bus’ blockades that have rocked San Francisco since 2013 – puts local gentrification processes in relation with global supply chains and the precarious working conditions prevalent in the tech industry. In the wake of a global pandemic, these entanglements have only gained importance.
Examples of precarious and invisibilized workers in the tech industry highlighted by this action include the drivers of the ‘Google buses’ – as the private shuttle fleets of Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and Google are commonly called. These shuttles transport highly paid programmers and software engineers back and forth between their workplaces in Silicon Valley and hip urban San Francisco, while leaving other workers out in the cold. A good dozen of these private shuttles were stopped by the activists during the morning blockade. Public buses, on the other hand, were few and far between – a sign of just how severely Silicon Valley’s two-tier system has already bled the city’s infrastructure dry.
The protest also called attention to the precarious working conditions of ‘independent contractors’ who collect and recharge e-scooters for startups like Bird and Lime, without a regular income or social benefits, similar to other workers in the gig economy. Ironically, these e-scooters are often touted as green, sustainable, and socially responsible. Yet they are part of speculation-driven business models that rely entirely on ‘disrupting’ public transportation and unionized sectors like the taxi industry, in an attempt to create monopolies and drive up their own market valuations. The e-scooter itself is really little more than a placeholder for speculation taking place behind the scenes. As such, it often ends up prematurely in a toxic hazardous electronic waste landfill in the Global South – and thus in the hands of workers whose conditions are even more precarious.
Welcome to Uber-City?!
Companies in the platform economy thus frequently profit from dependencies and precarious working conditions that they themselves drive forward with their disruptive business models. For example, by dismantling unionized sectors such as the taxi industry and undermining public transportation. Or, as in the case of Airbnb – another globally operating tech company headquartered in San Francisco – by driving up rents and exacerbating the housing crisis in cities around the world. Then, they offer their app-based services as a solution: Those who can no longer afford their rent can become a ‘host’ or earn extra money in their ‘spare time’ as an ‘independent contractor’ driving for Uber.
Since these activities are managed via the companies’ own digital platforms, they also generate vast amounts of data that companies can analyze, resell, and strategically evaluate – whether to oust competitors in the battle for market share or to subject their own workforce to smart algorithms that monitor every move and constantly introduce new targets or faster production rhythms.
In an attempt to outmaneuver competitors by driving down prices and wages and capturing market shares with the support of powerful investors, companies like Uber also seek to expand their influence within their respective sectors – in Uber’s case, mobility. Thus, Uber not only offers ridesharing but is also expanding into app-based e-bike rentals (Uber Jump), its own food delivery service (Uber Eats), a private bus service (Uber Bus), medical transportation (Uber Health), and so on. This provides a more comprehensive picture of the mobility habits of different demographic groups, often monitored right up to people’s front doors. In turn, this intimate data collection increases the competitive advantage of companies like Uber, which, incidentally, do not need to generate profits as long as investors can be kept satisfied with high stock prices and narratives of future growth.
Taking over physical infrastructure is therefore of strategic importance for companies in the digital market economy, even if app-based services may give the impression that locality and materiality have virtually dissolved into thin air in the digital cloud. Just how crucial it is to observe and analyze consumer behavior in non-virtual – and especially urban – space is also demonstrated by the acquisition of the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods by the online giant Amazon, or by projects such as Google’s ‘Sidewalk Labs,’ which drive profit-oriented data extraction in urban space.
Zuckerberg General Hospital
Structural conditions such as these, implemented long before the pandemic, have significantly shaped the course of the COVID-19 crisis in the Bay Area and its highly unequal social impacts. In fact, the pandemic does not so much emerge as a radical turning point, but rather acts as an accelerator for pre-existing social inequalities and precarious working conditions. In San Francisco, this also includes the privatization of public infrastructure, which tech companies and neoliberal city governance have promoted and exacerbated for decades. Emblematic for this development is for example the public hospital in San Francisco, which is now branded as Zuckerberg General Hospital after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. As this example shows, even philanthropy can play a strategic role in the corporate takeover of urban infrastructure.
Let’s now return to our initial example. Consider just how severely Google buses, Uber, and startup e-scooters have already undermined public transportation. In light of the additional pandemic-related losses and public budget shortfalls, it now appears that the city might need to permanently cut more than half of San Francisco’s public bus lines. This is a typical example of austerity urbanism, which hits already disadvantaged groups particularly hard.
By contrast, companies like Amazon and Instacart have emerged as winners of the crisis with their platform-based (and ‘contactless’) home delivery services. Amazon’s growing monopolistic position – further fueled by Trump’s undermining of the public postal service in the run-up to the 2020 elections – is also turning the political power balance upside down. Or as Julia Carrie Wong recently put it in The Guardian: Welcome to the US of Amazon. Meanwhile, the company’s fulfillment centers have become veritable virus hotspots, as worker protests against hazardous working conditions and a lack of protective gear during the pandemic are being nipped in the bud.
Many of the essential and precarious workers that are particularly affected by the virus and the impacts of the pandemic belong to groups who are marginalized by both class exploitation and racism. For example, the LatinX community in San Francisco makes up just 15% of the city’s population but accounts for nearly 50% of the city’s COVID cases. Their role as essential service providers is often coupled with precarious living conditions and long-standing structural racism that has carved its traces into the urban landscape. Poverty, segregation, and environmental racism, in turn, lead to negative health outcomes, as starkly illustrated by the high COVID-19 death rates among Black Americans.
Attack on ‘critical infrastructure’
Mass infections in homeless shelters and prisons also highlight how much the existing infrastructure – including the infrastructure of mass incarceration and a racist police apparatus – has shaped the conditions underlying the disparate impacts of the pandemic. The recent wildfires, which engulfed entire swaths of land around the Bay Area for weeks in August, brought these interconnections to light with particular urgency. Prisoners are, in fact, also exploited as laborers, for example in the grueling and dangerous work of firefighting. Their ‘pay’ amounts to just a few dollars a day, and most are denied a job with the fire department after their release from prison due to their criminal record – even though they would be highly qualified for the work and are desperately needed.
The pandemic has added yet another evil twist to this vicious cycle. The notoriously overcrowded San Quentin prison in the Bay Area, for example, is one of the pandemic’s largest local hotspots, with over 2,000 infected inmates – a whooping two-thirds of its prisoners. Any thought of inmates assisting with firefighting is now out of the question. Those who are not sick are in lockdown due to COVID-19 – a humanitarian catastrophe and one of the reasons why the U.S., with its record-high prison population, cannot get the pandemic under control. And why the fires continue to rage and tens of thousands had to be evacuated in the midst of the pandemic.
Found guilty for causing some of the deadliest wildfires in recent history was the private company PG&E, responsible for the ‘public’ electricity supply in the region. Profit-driven infrastructural mismanagement, the climate crisis, and privatization of public infrastructure, yet again, lie at the heart of these catastrophes. In short: our own infrastructure here in the U.S. is often deadly. And this is not a coincidence, but the result of deliberate political interventions.
Cynically, the attack on the ‘critical infrastructure’ of health insurance in the midst of an escalating health crisis is led not only by Republicans, who are pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’) and potentially leave another 20 million people out in the cold. Companies based in the heart of the progressive model city San Francisco, too, are actively working to undermine workers’ rights and benefits. Once again, gig companies like Uber, Lyft, and Postmates are at the forefront here, having poured millions into a local initiative (Proposition 22) to prevent their ‘independent contractors’ from being treated as employees who receive benefits such as paid sick days. Uber even threatened to leave California altogether if the legal framework were adjusted in ways that might be economically disadvantageous to the company’s investors. This is a classic attempt by the gig economy to blackmail local politicians and mobilize its own precarious workforce as a lobby for the company’s disruptive business model.
Gig workers responded with large-scale organizing and protests, including a car caravan outside Uber’s world headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, where the disruptive company for years benefited from public subsidies in the form of tax breaks. Although the city of San Francisco rejected the Uber-funded Proposition 22, the initiative won a majority in the state of California on November 3, potentially paving the way for further corporate advances and future labor struggles in other U.S. cities or even worldwide. Once again, these examples demonstrate how the disruption of public transportation, the dismantling of unionized sectors, and the profit-driven data extraction by platform companies foster new dependencies and give a boost to disruptive, speculation-based business models. And this, certainly, has detrimental effects on public health. Because “Techsploitation is toxic” – especially during a global pandemic.
But the protests continue as well…
Editor’s note: Also read “Precarious Labor in the Underdog Version of Silicon Valley Company Towns” by Katja Schwaller in BG. The two-part article is based on the author’s presentation at Silent Works, available as a video talk on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/480410376