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Opinion
After Nearly 25 Years, I Sign Off... Wishing Trump Wasn't the Horrific Culmination of Our Disastrous 'War on Terror'
I’m at an age where my friends are indeed beginning to die and it pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American planet to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better.
Jun 04, 2026
Okay, here’s what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later.
I was living in New York City (as I still am) when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, of course, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.
But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some strange sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world did indeed seem to flip upside down. That was, of course, after President George W. Bush responded early that October by — god save us! — invading Afghanistan (which, at least to me, was a shock and a half in its own right) and launching his disastrous “Global War on Terror.” Sometime in the weeks that followed, my memory (not exactly trustworthy at almost 82 years of age) is that I saw an article deep inside the print New York Times (which, by the way, I still read daily on actual paper) noting that U.S. soldiers were by then fighting in parts of Afghanistan where the troops of the Soviet Union had struggled endlessly (and lost badly) during that imperial power’s disastrous Afghan war of the previous century, which did indeed help take it down. And that, too, in some grim fashion, stunned me. Talk about mistakes that history had all too clearly signaled should never happen again (and again and again)!
I was at the time (even if barely) online and so I copied that piece into an email and sent it out with a note to a small set of friends. And somehow that began the process that led to TomDispatch.
In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home.
I soon realized that, thanks to the online world, I could actually read around the globe — the British Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, etc. — and that out there in the rest of the universe, there were other ways this ever-stranger world of ours was being looked at than the ones that largely dominated attention here in the U.S., post-9/11. And so, as I began stumbling across ever more pieces that seemed to offer different perspectives on our increasingly eerie world, I started emailing them to a growing list of friends and acquaintances. And after a time — to my complete surprise — people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all emailed me that they wanted to be added to my list. And with those send-outs, I began including little introductory explanatory notes or sets of comments (which launched the future TomDispatch form with my eternal little introductions — literally thousands of them over these nearly 25 years — to every piece I posted at TD except my own).
And I remember exactly the moment when I suddenly realized that something out of the ordinary was happening not just in the ever-stranger world out there, but to me, too. Susan Sontag, a writer I had long admired but didn’t know from a hole in the wall, suddenly emailed me out of the blue and asked to be added to what would become the TomDispatch email list (though it wasn’t yet called that). I was stunned. And soon, I was sending out to — I no longer remember exactly how many — but certainly several hundred people (with more being added every week). And that was the moment when someone I hardly knew (though he, too, was on my mailing list), Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute, called me out of the blue and asked if I might, in the future, be interested in turning those emails of mine into a website that he then did indeed set up for me and that he — not I — called “TomDispatch.”
Initially, at the new site, I simply did what I had been doing in my emails. I continued to find interesting pieces published elsewhere about our ever stranger and more disturbing world, wrote little introductions of my own, and then put in their headlines and first paragraphs with a link to the full piece wherever it had first appeared. At some point, however, I started writing longer commentaries of my own on a world that seemed to grow stranger by the week. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew a surprising number of writers whose voices, I thought, were distinctly needed in the strange post-9/11 world we were already living through.
After all, among other things, I had been an editor, first at Pantheon Books for 15 years in the previous century and later, in this one, at Metropolitan Books, the publishing house my old friend (and Pantheon coeditor) Sara Bershtel had set up. I had, for instance, published Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire at Metropolitan in 2000 to essentially no attention, minimal (and not particularly good) reviews, and few sales. Osama bin Laden’s assault on New York City and Washington, D.C., however, turned that book into a nationwide bestseller and put that title word of his into the language in a big-time fashion (and he would indeed write for TomDispatch memorably in the War on Terror years that followed).
The War on Terror Comes Home, A Terrible Science Fiction Novel
And yes, Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks were indeed a nightmare, but this country responded to them almost unimaginably badly by creating a full-scale, seemingly never-ending set of further nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq (and, of course, over the years from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Somalia in Africa, not to speak of all those global CIA “black sites” meant for the torture of Global War on Terror prisoners). And out of all those nightmares and so much more (none of which I ever would have imagined possible once upon a time) came the presidencies (and who would have believed that there could be two of them!) of Donald (the mad duck) Trump.
From the start, TomDispatch was witnessing and reporting on America’s distinctly imperial fate. I was watching with both horror and fascination as the greatest power (perhaps ever) on planet Earth (once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991) was somehow going down, down, down, without even a helping hand from an opposing imperial power. After all, early in this century, China had yet truly to rise and now that it has, it’s not acting like a typical imperial power of history. It has (at least as yet) not launched its own version of a Global War on Terror and its leaders seem remarkably intent not on colonizing the rest of Asia in some unexpected fashion, but on making a fortune producing the world’s green energy machinery (including, at the moment, 80% of global solar energy panels), even if they’re also still outdoing every other country on this planet — despite Donald Trump’s efforts — in burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).
In some strange fashion, I watched and recorded at TomDispatch just how my country was playing out its grim version of the predictable decline of all imperial powers, historically speaking, in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion. And of course, in 2016, this country gave decline a remarkable new meaning on an increasingly strange and disturbed planet by electing Donald J. Trump as president.
As my version of TomDispatch ends (and Nick Turse’s launches), I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a world I simply could never have imagined. Don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday “replace humans in controlling the planet”! Unreligious as I may be, I’m with the Pope on AI — though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.
And the War on Terror Comes Home Yet Again in the Form of Donald Trump
In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home, big time! In his own fashion, he could hardly have been more of a terror and, to make matters so much worse, in 2026, a year expected to be the second hottest in recorded history, he seems remarkably intent on making war not just on Iran, or any other random country like Somalia or Nigeria, but on this very planet itself. Even his anti-immigrant agenda is, as the Guardian recently reported, ensuring that ever more fossil fuels go into the atmosphere via the stunning number of planes deporting those immigrants, helping make ever more areas of the planet ever hotter, and — of course! — ensuring that ever more people will end up as — yes! — migrants.
In short, whether it’s climate change, Iran, or you name it, Donald Trump (the second time around) is already giving heat new meaning.
And none of this (not a bit!) would I have believed in November 2001 when all of it began for me. Had you tried to show me such a future then, I would have simply laughed you out of the room and gone about my business.
In a sense, you might say that the war on terror simply never ended, since my country has never stopped bombing other countries around the world, the latest (but undoubtedly not the last), of course, being Iran. And I suspect that, without that “war,” Donald Trump would have been inconceivable.
Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive.
I’m at an age where my friends are indeed beginning to die and it pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American planet to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better. And once upon a time (if I even imagined them coming into this world of ours), I might have hoped that someday in the then-distant future I would have signed off TomDispatch by claiming that I was indeed leaving them on at least a modestly better planet than when I began so long ago.
No such luck, of course, and that makes me sad indeed. I mean, we already knew that we were truly on the planet from hell when, on his third try, Donald Trump actually managed to garner 49.8% of the popular vote and win another four unbelievable years as president of the anything but United States.
Yes, anyone (even I) certainly could have hoped for better. In fact, I certainly did — even if such hopes proved unrealistic indeed. Of course, one can (and should) still hope that the next great imperial power, obviously China (if, in fact, there are to be more great powers on this ever less great planet of ours), might indeed prove more reasonable and less Trumpian. At least, that country’s leadership plans to make a fortune off the decarbonization of Planet Earth by producing the equipment, from electric vehicles to solar panels, needed to green this world of ours (even while continuing to pour record amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere).
Let’s also not forget that other former great power, Russia, which continues fighting its miserable war in Ukraine into its fifth year, while, of course, pouring ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (as all wars now do), while only recently launching actual nuclear missiles (though with dummy warheads instead of nuclear payloads) against Ukraine. (Just what we need on this planet of ours, of course — the threat of actual nuclear warfare!)
Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive. And with that grimly in mind and only wishing things were better, let me sign off on almost 25 years at TomDispatch. Sigh…
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Cuba Works Health Miracles While Under US Blockade
Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world.
Jun 04, 2026
Last week, the Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology, or CIM, announced a major health breakthrough with VAXIRA, a vaccine treatment for lung cancer. This is a remarkable achievement, made only more impressive by the fact that this is Cuba’s second lung cancer vaccine.
The vaccine stops the progression of cancer by developing the patient’s immune system to fight off cancer cells. This has proven to significantly prolong people’s survival. Since 2013, the vaccine has been monitored, trialed, and tested on more than 1,300 patients. Over a 10-year period, patients survived a median of 76.6 months, with 20% of all patients who were given VAXIRA experiencing unexpected long-term survival. Last year, VAXIRA was awarded the Technological Innovation Prize in Cuba for its contribution to healthcare in Cuba. This is an incredible feat for humanity and the battle against cancer—and it is being done by a country facing the longest and most severe blockade in history.
In 2011, Cuba developed CIMAvax, which remains the world’s only approved lung cancer vaccine. This vaccine works to induce the immune system to stop the growth of cancer cells and slow the progression of tumors. This vaccine has already treated more than 5,000 people across the world and many more thousands in Cuba itself. Given the immense significance of the vaccine, the United States agreed to a special arrangement to trial the vaccine in the US. The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York has been running clinical trials with CIM since 2018. They have run the first clinical trials of CIMAvax in the United States. The very same nation that is imposing a genocidal blockade on Cuba is also benefiting from the historic breakthroughs in healthcare.
These major developments in medicine to treat cancer are not Cuba’s only awe-inspiring health achievements.
The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuba produced five vaccines: Ablada, Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa. Cuba had one of the lowest Covid-19 deaths in the Western Hemisphere—and by 2021, Cuba’s fatality rate was just 0.59% compared with the 2.2% worldwide average. The vaccines were produced without the need for specialist refrigeration, which meant they could be easily transported and also distributed across the world to places where accessing such infrastructure would be impossible. Quickly, Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico all picked up the vaccine to protect their population.
By 2023, Cuba had the third-highest rate of vaccinations per 100,000 people. Despite the fact that the US banned the country from importing the syringes necessary to immunize its own population. In this context, Cuba was the first country in the world to vaccinate toddlers and children, as part of their push to reopen schools safely.
Cuba, like the United States, offered its Covid-19 vaccines to the world. While Cuba donated vaccines to St. Vincent and the Grenadines and sold them as cheaply as they could, the US bullied countries into putting up their assets, like embassy buildings and military bases, in order to access vaccines. This was to “protect” against future legal challenges that vaccine recipients might file against the manufacturer of the vaccine. This profit motive was a major cause for the vaccine apartheid in the distribution of Covid-19 protection across the world. As of August 2024, in high-income countries, more than 222 doses had been distributed per 100 people. While in low-income countries, this was less than 46. In 2021, US pharmaceutical companies that produced Covid-19 vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) collected an eye-watering revenue of $31 billion. The concept that companies and shareholders should make money from a pandemic should be utterly outrageous.
Biotechnology
Cuba leads the world in its vaccine breakthroughs. But, how is this all possible? It is not by accident that Cuba is able to develop world-leading health breakthroughs in medicine. Cuba has developed a world-class biotechnological sector that is state-owned and operates in the interests of the people, not profit. There are no profit motives to producing vaccines; research and development are for the collective benefit, and resources are shared to better the process of scientific development. This is quite the opposite situation in capitalist countries, where biotechnology is a major competition dominated by pharmaceutical companies motivated entirely by profits, which often means that when there are major developments in health, they are not accessible to people.
In 1981, Cuba opened the Biological Research Center, despite the blockade stopping the entry of equipment, materials, access to research journals, and medicines. In the first 9 years, the center produced three products. Between 1990 and 2000, it produced 18, and between 2001 and 2010, it produced more than 40. Today, that figure continues to grow. The center flourished into a world-class biotechnological sector that has made major health breakthroughs. Cuba produced the world’s first human vaccine to contain a synthetic antigen for Haemophilus influenzae type B.
In 1989, Cuba produced the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine during a severe outbreak of the disease in the country. This was the first ever vaccine produced to protect against Meningitis B and was exported to protect people in countries across Latin America. The US approved its first vaccine for Meningitis B in 2014.
Cuba once had among the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%.
The following year, Cuba produced a vaccine for Hepatitis B. They joined just five other countries as a manufacturer of Hep B vaccines: France, South Korea, the United States, Indonesia, and Britain. As the US blockade made it virtually impossible and far too expensive to import the vaccine, Cuba produced their own and eliminated Hepatitis B in under 15 years.
In 2006, Cuba developed Heberprot-P, the only medicine in the world to reduce the amputation rate of patients with diabetic foot ulcers by 75%. Within 10 years, it was used in 23 countries. It has treated more than 400,000 people with foot ulcers. In 2024, the United States even broke its own blockade and approved it for trials and use. The very thought that Americans who suffer from diabetes might be treated by Cuban medicine while being fed propaganda against Cuba and funding a war against the very Cuban researchers and scientists helping them reveals how inhumane this blockade is.
By 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. Cuba managed this because of its socialist model, which is the same reason why it is not celebrated in mainstream media and looked to as a center for health advances in the US. This world historical achievement came as a result of Cuba’s universal health system that integrated maternal and child health programs with HIV and STI treatment. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of AIDS in the world and the lowest in the Americas, thanks to the free provision of antiretroviral treatment it has been distributing since 2001. Its vaccination programs have eradicated diseases that continue to cause death and suffering around the world, including diphtheria in 1979, measles in 1993, whooping cough in 1994, and rubella in 1995. Cuba has also developed the highest control of blood pressure in the world.
The same principles that led Cuba to produce world-leading medical breakthroughs are similar to its success in eliminating diseases. Cuba’s vaccination model is motivated by protecting its people. The National Immunization Program, which began in 1962, has saved the lives of at least 560,000 children who would have otherwise contracted diseases if it weren’t for the program. This is motivated by four directives: equity of vaccine distribution; integration of vaccination in primary healthcare; the inclusion of active community participation; and providing vaccines free of charge. These guiding principles indicate how central the health of all society is, not corporate interests or greed.
Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world. Before the revolution in 1959, 300 children were paralyzed by polio each year. One of the first measures by the revolutionary government was immunization for Cuban society. In 1962, the polio campaign launched through mobilizing 100,000 members of newly founded revolutionary committees to conduct a population census and vaccinate all children. Within months, polio was eradicated in Cuba, making it one of the first countries in the world to do so. Polio is still a leading cause of paralysis and death across the world.
These health achievements have massively benefited people across the world through access to new treatments and cures, affordable and accessible vaccines and medicines, and models for healthcare. But another awe-inspiring element of Cuba’s healthcare is its international solidarity.
Cuba has restored the eyesight for more than 4 million people with its joint program with Venezuela, Operation Miracle. They have sent more than 600,000 health workers on medical missions to 160 countries in response to pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other crises where no other country would act. They have and continue to train doctors from the Global South for free so they go back to their home countries to practice medicine.
Cuba makes these miraculous achievements for humanity while facing a blockade that causes shortages of medicines in pharmacies across Cuba; blocks researchers from accessing health journals; and prevents the entry of equipment, spare parts, and laboratory materials that could make it easier and faster to conduct research. The US blockade should be seen as an attack on humanity itself. This is a genocidal act of war against a population that exports doctors across the world by an empire that exports bombs, fighter jets, and invading soldiers.
Cuba once had among the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%. It is estimated that this has cost 1,800 lives of infants. This is the material result of a blockade that intends to kill, punish, and destroy a country for asserting its own sovereignty. Yet, even still, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than that in the United States. The US enforces its blockade on Cuba so that it can try to claim Cuba is a “failed state,” which also means its universal, free healthcare system “fails”; all so it can maintain its abysmal healthcare system that operates purely for profit, despite the level of death, bankruptcy, and suffering it causes to poor Americans.
The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.
Like Fidel Castro said in 2003: “Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country does not possess nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons. Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated in the idea of saving lives. It would absolutely contradict this concept to put a scientist or a doctor to work to produce substances, bacteria, or viruses to kill other human beings.”
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The One Conscience Claim America Won’t Honor
Religious liberty claims win everywhere, except when it comes to financing war.
Jun 04, 2026
The war in Iran has forced many Americans to confront what their tax dollars make them party to. After the US has killed hundreds of Iranian children in school and bombed the country’s civilian infrastructure, more and more Americans are considering tax refusal. It’s a tradition older than the republic itself. Quakers resisted military taxes in the colonies, sometimes at the price of seized property. Thomas David Thoreau was jailed for refusing a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. And hundreds of thousands resisted the telephone tax during the Vietnam War, when the National War Tax Resistance counted 192 centers in 45 states.
Call that “freedom.”
In an age of ascendant religious liberty, a fortunate class of Americans enjoys it in special measure. Employers, schools, religious institutions, and corporations have won exemption after exemption from ordinary legal duties they claim violate their religious faith. Creationist craft store chains no longer have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Public school football coaches may launch disruptive displays of prayer at midfield. For every belief, the court has seemed ready with a baroque exception.
Except one, of course: the pacifist’s objection to financing war. One of the oldest religious and conscience claims in American life has been a consistent loser in court. Even the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which helped make religious freedom claims an all-conquering force in American law, worked no change for war-tax resisters. In the late 1990s, Quaker objectors tried RFRA and First Amendment claims in federal court. Some offered to pay their full income-tax bill if the money could be directed to nonmilitary uses; others withheld the military portion and redirected it to life-sustaining organizations. All lost.
Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.
Mushrooms have fared better. In 2001, a mushroom company challenged a federal program that required it to help pay for generic mushroom advertising. The company argued that it could not be made to fund a message it did not believe: that mushrooms were mushrooms, and that its own were no better than anyone else’s. The Supreme Court agreed, finding the program violated the First Amendment. Free speech principles have thus protected the consciences of corporations from being wounded by mushroom advertising. But when pacifists, under a similar theory, have objected to financing war? Court after court has told them to get over it.
In this way, American law has built a vast sanctuary for conservative religious conscience and libertarian free speech sensibilities. That sanctuary ends at the gates of the only thing more powerful: the national-security state. Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.
Courts might be able to throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do, but Congress has no such excuse. It has let the most tepid solution to conscientious objection to war taxation languish for decades. The Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, most recently reintroduced in 2021, would deposit the income, estate, and gift tax payments of conscientious objectors and religious pacifists into a fund reserved for nonmilitary uses. Americans who object to war would no longer have to choose between violating the law and violating their conscience. Instead, the bill would offer them a third way: Pay in full, but not for war.
The Peace Tax Fund Act has been reintroduced for five decades, and a more embarrassingly modest intervention is hard to imagine. The bill reduces neither military spending nor objectors’ tax burden. It would offer accommodations less burdensome than those given to other religious-liberty claimants. And it’s been backed in different iterations over the years by giants like John Lewis, the “conscience of Congress”; Ron Dellums, the first Black chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Mark Hatfield, an evangelical Republican, World War II veteran, and one of the first Americans to witness Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.
All of this raises the question: so why hasn’t it passed? If Congress cannot enact even this most minimal of bills—one that leaves the military budget untouched and still requires objectors to pay their full federal tax burden—then the objection cannot really be about administrative inconvenience or military necessity. Indeed, the Peace Tax Fund is far more dangerous than that. By making war taxation visible as a moral choice, the act would make Americans do what the national-security state is desperate to prevent them from doing: think.
That would begin on the otherwise dry tax form, where it would be hard to miss a new option to object to war. A taxpayer might wonder why it exists. She might begin to question how the military and intelligence agencies spend their combined trillion-dollar budget. She might wonder why the country goes to war and plucks foreign leaders from their beds without public debate. The national-security state has fought hard to keep those questions at bay by keeping citizens in the dark. Questions, after all, can quickly lead to demands for answers. The Peace Tax Fund would encourage them by inviting Americans to take a hard look at the killing done in their names, and that kind of public scrutiny is an existential threat to the military and intelligence agencies accustomed to immunity from it.
This is the only explanation for an otherwise odd situation. Congress appears more willing to lose money to scattered acts of illegal tax resistance than to provide conscientious objectors with a legal pathway to objection. That makes sense once one sees that legal objection is more dangerous to the national-security state than evasion. The Peace Tax Fund Act would legitimize opposition to the military-industrial complex and its casual violence by transforming that opposition into a recognized claim of conscience. Once the state recognizes those claims as the stuff of deep moral conviction rather than the anarchical fringe, it undermines the military-industrial complex’s favorite tactic: ridiculing opponents as traitors and stigmatizing their claims as beyond the pale.
The consciences of objectors and pacifists do not command the tender political theater reserved for the craft store chain, the football coach, or the mushroom company. But that should tell opponents of the American war machine something hopeful: The people who operate it do not believe it can survive public scrutiny. The task, then, is to drag more of that machinery into the light, where everyday Americans might begin to ask whether the country uses its power for good in the world—or for them.
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It's Time to Set Global Labor Standards for the Gig Economy
Strong International Labour Organization standards should start from a basic principle: If a company controls the worker, it should bear the responsibilities that come with that control.
Jun 04, 2026
Most discussion of artificial intelligence and work is about the future: which jobs may disappear, which skills may lose value, which workers may be replaced. But for millions of gig workers, who work for online platforms such as Uber, this future is already here.
Algorithms set their pay, assign their tasks, monitor their performance, and determine whether they can keep working at all. The issue is not just that technology may someday replace workers. It is that companies are already using it to control them while shirking the responsibilities that normally come with that kind of control. This leaves many workers with unstable pay, dangerous conditions, and little recourse when something goes wrong. But this could be about to change.
From June 1 to 12 in Geneva, governments will enter a final round of negotiations at the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations agency dedicated to labor rights, over the first binding global standard for what is called platform work. This new treaty would regulate jobs managed through apps and websites, from taxis and delivery to home care, cleaning, and online piecework. Governments will decide whether companies that control this work should be required to treat workers as employees and comply with labor protections.
The stakes go well beyond the gig economy. Increasingly, workers report to an algorithmic boss in hospitals, care work, domestic labor, and beyond. The question is whether governments will set rules for how companies use these systems to manage work or let companies keep writing the terms themselves.
If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.
Gig work today offers a preview of what happens when they do. These companies promise flexibility and independence. For many workers, the reality is low and unstable pay; dangerous conditions; and no sick leave, unemployment insurance, or retirement benefits.
This isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system. Companies use software to manage workers closely, then contracts to deny responsibility for them. The result is familiar cost-shifting in a new technological form: Workers absorb the risks while companies maintain control.
And it is scaling fast. DoorDash, which now operates in 30 countries, reported global revenue growth of 38% from the same period the previous year in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Uber, operational in about 70 countries, ranked ninth on Fortune’s 2025 list of the 100 fastest-growing public companies, with earnings per share growing 445% over three years. These companies create value by shifting costs off the company’s books and onto everyone else.
In recent months, Human Rights Watch spoke with workers in 10 countries. They described the same kinds of abuse everywhere.
In Beirut, we spoke with Apraham Orfalian, 74, who has worked for Uber since 2015. In October 2024, a passenger held a knife to his throat, forced him out of his car, and stole his vehicle and his phone. Without the car, he lost his income. Without sick leave, workers’ compensation, or support from Uber, he had to rely on his siblings to get by. “We are workers for Uber,” he said. “We generate income for them. At least they should show responsibility.”
In Gulf countries, delivery workers described cycling in extreme heat because they felt they could not afford to refuse orders, even when conditions were unsafe. In India, a worker injured on the job was left to cover his own medical costs. In the UK, another went months without income or injury compensation after being attacked while working.
Some governments have started to act. Mexico adopted legislation extending social security and labor protections to some full-time platform workers. In India, worker protests pushed the government to restrict 10-minute delivery promises that put dangerous pressure on delivery workers. Courts in the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have recognized rights that companies tried hard to avoid. But these gains are uneven and fragile. Without global standards, companies can keep exploiting gaps.
Strong ILO standards should start from a basic principle: If a company controls the worker, it should bear the responsibilities that come with that control. That means a presumption of employment in which companies exercise employer-like power; pay for all working time, which often includes waiting for assignments; safety protections; social security; protection from arbitrary deactivation; and a meaningful right to understand and challenge algorithmic decisions that shape pay, ratings, and access to work.
Some governments are trying to weaken those protections before they are written. They want standards that simply defer to weak national laws and define workers narrowly, and promise transparency without giving workers real power to challenge the decisions that shape their livelihoods.
Companies that depend on gig workers will say stronger rules would destroy flexibility. But that flexibility doesn’t really exist for many workers. Even if a worker can choose when to log on, they deserve protection from poverty wages, arbitrary dismissal, and uncompensated injury. If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.
This is about more than how companies that use gig workers operate. It is about whether labor law can keep pace with the way companies now organize labor. If workers cannot understand or challenge the systems that govern their work, software will become an efficient way to exercise control without accountability.
Governments meeting in Geneva can still set limits and protect workers’ rights. They should use that power before exploitation becomes the blueprint.
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