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Friday Nite Videos | August 24, 2018

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Beto O'Rourke on NFL Players Kneeling. The Fractured Politics of a Browning America. Why Tesla Is Building City-Sized Batteries. Inside Flex—Amazon's Army of Everyday Delivery People. David Pecker's Past Practice Puts POTUS in a Pickle.

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How Blockchain Is Poised to Disrupt the Gig Economy

Chris Young Entrprenuer
Workers and unions trying to organize gig workers should stay abreast of technological changes. This author claims rapid adoption of blockchain in the next several years will have major implications for alternative work arrangements.

The Immigrants Fueling the Gig Economy

Lauren Markham The Atlantic
man driving car The short-term promise of easy cash can trap individuals in bad long-term conditions. This article is the third in a series about how the gig economy is shaping the future of labor and what that means for workers.

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Why Millennial Precarity Should Change The Way We Think About Class

Lauren Nicole Clark The Establishment
With the bleak future millennials are facing, it must be asked: Will the cultural capital of middle classness retain the same meaning as the middle class in America continues to erode? Or will class culture and consciousness evolve?

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Airbnb Finds a Union It Can Work With After Failed Efforts

Josh Eidelson Bloomberg
The United Auto Workers won a union contract covering nearly 150 cafeteria workers at four Airbnb facilities. It’s the latest development in a unionization trend among tech companies’ sub-contracted staff. Share Better, a group backed by Unite Here, the hotel industry, housing groups and elected officials, said Thursday that the new Airbnb effort doesn’t go far enough.

Unions and the Gig-Economy: The Case of AirBnB

Steven Tufts Socialist Project
The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions for workers. Do emerging ‘sharing-economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb mark a significant shift in production and distribution systems? Are they emancipatory or exploitive?
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