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gig economy
AI Is Changing Work—Our Unemployment Insurance System Must Change With It
A functional unemployment insurance system for today’s economy would cover more workers, including part-time, gig, and temporary workers, and would provide benefits that actually allow families to survive while searching for new work.
Jun 25, 2026
For millions of workers, the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of work is no longer theoretical. It is already showing up in layoffs, hiring freezes, shrinking departments, and growing anxiety about whether the paycheck families rely on today will still exist tomorrow.
But the most important question is not simply which jobs AI will eliminate. It is whether workers will have any real support when those jobs disappear.
While policymakers, executives, and economists debate which industries will thrive and which occupations will disappear in the age of AI, working Americans are focused on more immediate concerns: paying rent, affording groceries, covering childcare, and figuring out how they would support their families if their income suddenly vanished.
Workers are right to worry, because the system meant to help them through job loss is already failing to meet this moment.
While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone.
America’s unemployment insurance system was built for a different era entirely, one in which AI was nonexistent. It was built for an era that assumed stable full-time employment, long-term employer relationships, and relatively predictable layoffs. Today’s economy looks nothing like that.
Millions of workers now move between part-time jobs, contract work, temporary positions, caregiving responsibilities, and periods outside the workforce entirely. But unemployment insurance rules still exclude many of those workers from receiving help when they need it most.
Today, only about 1 in 4 unemployed workers receive unemployment benefits nationwide. In some states, fewer than 13% received support at all. And even when workers do qualify, benefits are often too low and too short-lived to keep families financially stable while they search for new work.
The result of this broken system is families scrambling to avoid financial free fall: draining savings accounts, falling behind on rent, or taking the first low-paying jobs they can find because they can’t afford to wait for something better.
That disconnect is already visible. While the number of unemployed workers has climbed sharply over the past year, unemployment claims have remained relatively flat—not because people are unaffected, but because so many workers are locked out of a system that no longer reflects the realities of modern work.
The first wave of AI disruption is already here. As adoption of these technologies increases, more workers will cycle between jobs, more families will navigate periods of unemployment, and more people will be forced to rebuild after losing work through no fault of their own.
And those burdens will not fall equally. Women—especially Black women, who are disproportionately represented in clerical and administrative jobs—are among the workers most vulnerable to displacement. Workers of color already face persistently higher unemployment rates because of structural inequities in the labor market. Yet when they lose work, they are significantly less likely to receive unemployment benefits and the economic stability those benefits are supposed to provide.
That reality is colliding with an already fragile economy. Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that college graduates are now experiencing recession-level rates of unemployment. Over the last year, unemployment among young college graduates averaged 5.5%—the highest sustained level outside the brief peak of the Covid-19 pandemic since the aftermath of the Great Recession.
These are graduates who were told that if they worked hard, earned a degree, and applied themselves, they would find stability and opportunity. Instead, many are entering a labor market defined by uncertainty and shrinking opportunities, all while facing a weakening safety net.
That is why modernizing our unemployment systems must be part of the AI conversation.
A functional unemployment insurance system for today’s economy would cover more workers, including part-time, gig, and temporary workers. It would provide benefits that actually allow families to survive while searching for new work. It would make it easier, not harder, for eligible workers to receive support. And it would actually be prepared to withstand economic downturns.
Unemployment insurance should be understood for what it truly is: economic infrastructure.
Just as roads and bridges help goods move through the economy, unemployment insurance helps people move through economic change without falling into crisis. A strong UI system gives people the stability to search for good jobs instead of being pushed into the first low-wage position available. It stabilizes families, communities, and local businesses during periods of disruption.
The age of stable employment is fading. More workers will inevitably face periods of transition, disruption, and job loss in the years ahead.
While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone. Modernizing unemployment insurance is not simply a matter of compassion. It is a matter of economic readiness.
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Workers Are Fighting Back Against Silicon Valley's Race to the Lowest Wage
There should be rules that prevent companies from using personal data to quietly lower pay for some people while others earn more for the same work, and working people should have the ability to organize.
Jun 12, 2026
Recent reporting has confirmed what many working people already feel every day: Companies are using personal data to decide the lowest wage someone will accept. What working people call exploitation, Silicon Valley calls innovation.
The seven largest gig platforms in the United States—Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber—are using data that tracks how long its users stay on an app, what jobs they accept, and how urgently they need income. This algorithm calculates what the employers can pay to get the job done at the lowest rate individuals will accept.
Not what their labor is worth. Not what is fair.
Gig work was sold as a way to make extra money on a flexible schedule. But that’s not what it looks like today. Nearly 1 in 4 people in the US now participate in some form of gig or freelance work. What was supposed to be a side hustle has become a main source of income for one-third of gig workers.
This isn’t just about gig work. It’s about whether we allow companies to rewrite the rules of the economy—or whether we demand a system that works for the people in it.
As layoffs rise and wages fall further behind the cost of living, more people are being pushed into this kind of work to keep up. Black people and other workers of color, who tend to be more dependent on this type of work than white people, have been especially hard hit. But these unfair practices can impact all workers.
“Under surveillance wage systems, different people may be paid different wages for largely the same work, and individual workers cannot predict their incomes over time,” the Washington Center for Equitable Growth reports. “Not only has pay for app-controlled jobs decreased over time,” but “people who work longer hours are paid less per hour.”
This is what happens when an economy limits options for some people, then funnels them into systems that take advantage of that lack of choice. Now they’re going even further—using data to predict what some experts call a “desperation wage,” or the lowest amount someone will accept based on their behavior.
And it’s not just happening in gig work. Similar systems are being used to set rent and adjust prices for goods and services in real time. The same idea applies: Use data to figure out the worst price or wage someone will tolerate, then charge just below that or pay just above it.
When you combine higher unemployment, lower wealth, and fewer protections, you get a system where some people have less room to say no—and are more likely to be taken advantage of. The message is simple: Take it or leave it. And for many, leaving it isn’t an option.
That’s why we’re starting to see pushback. Working people are demanding more transparency. Some are organizing. New models are emerging that promise fairer pay and more control. But these changes are happening because people are speaking up—not because companies chose to act.
So what needs to happen next is clear. If companies are going to use algorithms to shape pay and access to work, those systems should be transparent. People should know how their pay is calculated.
Workers should be able to see how much of each transaction goes to them compared with how much the company keeps. There should be rules that prevent companies from using personal data to quietly lower pay for some people while others earn more for the same work. And working people should have the ability to organize and push back.
Because this isn’t just about gig work. It’s about whether we allow companies to rewrite the rules of the economy—or whether we demand a system that works for the people in it. Technology should make work more stable, more fair, and more predictable. Right now, it’s doing the opposite. And that’s not inevitable.
It’s a choice.
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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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Trump’s Labor Department Tries to Redefine Workers Out of Their Rights
A proposed rule would make it easier to classify employees as contractors—and harder to claim minimum wage and overtime protections.
Mar 03, 2026
Last week, Trump’s Labor Department proposed a rule aimed at making it easier for businesses to call workers “independent contractors” instead of employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It’s the latest round in a regulatory back-and-forth. The legal details get dense fast. But the real-world implications are straightforward: millions of workers are at risk of losing foundational minimum wage and overtime protections, exacerbating their financial precarity.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) provides employees with minimum wage and overtime protections. When Congress passed the FLSA, it sought to cover the broadest concept of employees possible, including those who were performing piece rate garment work out of their kitchens - something that today might look like gig work.
Since the 1940s, courts across the country and in vastly different employment contexts have consistently held that someone is an employee if they are economically dependent on the employer for work. Despite this broad protection in the law, too many employers today misclassify workers as independent contractors—including dishwashers at restaurants, auto mechanic technicians, and even nurses—in order to sidestep legal obligations and lower labor costs. These misclassified workers don’t just lose out on minimum wage and overtime protections. They are often misclassified under other employment laws too, leaving them saddled with higher payroll tax burdens, all while not having the protections of Unemployment Insurance if they are let go, Workers’ Compensation if they are injured on the job, or other typical benefits associated with employment.
Trump’s latest proposed rule would give employers cover to misclassify more workers as independent contractors. Specifically, it tosses aside a decades-long test that the Wage and Hour Division uses when determining a worker’s economic dependence, and instead advances a slimmed down version of the test that will enable businesses to more easily skirt their responsibilities under the FLSA. The Department believes that the long-standing test as articulated in the Biden 2024 Final Rule leads to “unnecessary classification of….workers as employees” and makes the independent contractor classification “more difficult.”
In short, the Department thinks the current test is too complicated, and employers are erring too often on the side of classifying workers as employees. The Department further claims that a slimmed-down test of classification would be a better fit for the modern economy. But at a time when businesses’ relationships with workers is getting more complicated, the test for determining classification shouldn’t be narrowed; it should remain probative. At a moment when we need a high-powered microscope to understand the complex layers of business models and management practices, the Department of Labor is seemingly saying a simple magnifying glass will do just fine. This approach will only exacerbate trends already underway in industries and occupations that have traditionally provided stable, middle-class jobs. Take, for example, nursing.
You might assume that someone working as a nurse in a hospital or nursing home is surely an employee of those entities. Not so anymore. Already, hospitals are relying on staffing agencies to fill nursing positions, and these agencies, in some cases, are misclassifying nurses as independent contractors. Research from the Roosevelt Institute has also highlighted how new app-based companies are using Uber-like platforms to hire, place, and manage nurses, all while claiming they are independent contractors. On these platforms, workers must compete for shifts and bid on pay, sometimes not knowing until the morning of whether they got a shift. These gig platforms have created a race to the bottom in wages and job quality, leaving some nurses without their own health insurance and relying on second jobs to make ends meet. Under Trump’s proposed rule, it will be far harder for workers under these models of management to realize their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act. And it will only encourage other businesses to follow suit.
To be sure, there are many legitimate independent contractors who are in business for themselves. These small businesses are important parts of our economy. But a dishwasher in the back of a restaurant isn’t in business for herself. An auto technician who shows up to the same shop day in and day out likely isn’t in business for himself. And surely a nurse caring for patients in a hospital isn’t in business for themselves.
The Trump Administration pulled out a sledgehammer on a cornerstone of the New Deal. Trump’s DOL and others who are proponents of making it easier to classify workers as independent contractors often claim this provides workers with greater flexibility in their life. But flexibility doesn’t mean better outcomes. Weakening the FLSA doesn’t result in a better life for more workers.
In fact, recent research on job quality experienced by workers shows stark differences in outcomes between independent contractors and employees across some key metrics. Independent contractors, for example, are more likely to report receiving less than 24 hours notice of when they need to work. At the same time, they are no more likely than W-2 employees to say they have input on when they can take a few hours off for personal reasons. Yet, independent contractors remain more likely to report wanting to work more hours and receive more money.
Last week’s proposed rule sadly isn’t a surprise but it is a stark reminder of how little this Administration cares about using the tools of government to enforce laws and advance policies that enable workers to secure a better life.
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Instacart, Stop Using American Shoppers as Lab Rats During an Affordability Crisis
The grocery delivery app is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
Dec 26, 2025
Somewhere, a mom taps through her grocery app while waiting in the school pickup line, purchasing a box of Wheat Thins for $5.99. Across town, someone else scrolls through the same grocery app and adds the exact same box of Wheat Thins to their cart. For them, the crackers ring up at $6.99. It is the same item, from the same store, at the same time, but one unlucky shopper is stuck paying a higher price. Neither shopper has any idea this pricing game is even being played.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. Increasingly, it’s happening all over the country. Right now, grocery delivery app Instacart is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
How do we know? Our team at Groundwork Collaborative had a feeling Instacart might be experimenting on shoppers, so we decided to run an experiment on them. Alongside our partners at Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union, we recruited over 400 volunteer secret shoppers to shop for the same basket of 20 items at the same grocery store at the same time. We ran the experiment in four different stores across the country.
The results were damning: At every store we tested, shoppers were charged different prices for an identical basket of groceries. Overall, Instacart basket totals varied by about 7%, with some items posting differences as high as 23%. For example: the exact same basket of groceries from a Safeway store in Seattle, Washington ran some shoppers $114.34, while other shoppers were charged $123.93. At a Target in North Canton, Ohio, prices varied by as much as $6, as some shoppers rang up a total of $84.43, while others were charged $87.91 or as much as $90.47.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction.
Based on the company’s own estimates, this “Instacart tax” could drain as much as $1,200 from American households’ pocketbooks each year.
Meanwhile, Instacart is gloating about their ability to use unaware shoppers as guinea pigs to pad their bottom line profits. On their website, the company notes that, “End shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment. For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop and only by a small margin; it’s negligible.” But we’re facing the greatest food affordability crisis in a generation. As grocery prices continue to rise and reliance on Buy Now, Pay Later is accelerating, it is painfully evident that an additional $1,200 a year is anything but negligible for many American families.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction. Enabled by corporate consolidation and artificial intelligence technologies, companies across industries now deploy a dizzying array of tactics designed to extract maximum profit from each individual. They tack on hidden fees; collude with their competitors on price increases; and individualize prices for consumers based on granular, personal data.
These predatory pricing strategies are not about managing scarcity or efficient markets. They’re corporations experimenting with your willingness to pay to see exactly how much they can squeeze out of you.
Since its release last week, our report has struck a national chord—earning front-page coverage in the New York Times, primetime coverage on broadcast news, and featuring in a video that has already amassed nearly 2 million views. Instacart’s own stock even dropped 6% the day after our report was published, which the Wall Street Journal attributed in part to our investigation.
This reaction is unsurprising: Americans dislike being surveilled, they resent being gouged, and they certainly don’t like being lab rats for profit-driven experimentation. Fair and honest markets are the bedrock of a healthy economy—and companies like Instacart jeopardize that trust by making prices opaque and unpredictable.
Our message to Instacart—and any corporation that would try to replicate their pricing experiment—is simple. Close the labs. American shoppers are not guinea pigs.
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Gigs That Work For All
A California pilot program offers a new blueprint for workforce development.
Nov 19, 2025
For over a decade, academics and progressive policymakers have been fretting about the “future of work” and the “gigification” of labor. And for good reason. Since the ascendance of companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart in the early 2010s, hundreds of thousands of people have taken on the work of fulfilling “gigs” provided by such apps. Consumers have become habituated to getting their rides, groceries, and household goods at the push of a button.
Workers often turn to “gig” jobs because they need flexible work schedules due to caregiving responsibilities or the need for multiple jobs to make ends meet. However, this work is usually low paying, precarious, and unprotected by employment or labor laws. That’s by design, and it’s a big problem: Those laws were created with the intention of protecting just these sorts of workers. The companies behind the apps argue that this is simply the price of flexibility.
There’s no reason that flexible work should require sacrificing the protections, rights, and opportunities provided by employment, like a guaranteed minimum wage and overtime for long hours; the right to a healthy and safe workplace; protections against discrimination and harassment; and insurance against the downside risks arising from the loss of jobs or workplace injuries.
Treating workers as independent contractors without rights and protections has become standard practice for many platform companies. Promoted by venture capital funders, the practice feeds a narrative that the acquisition of skills, experience, and on-the-job savvy—traditionally a responsibility of employers—falls on individual workers to “entrepreneurially” pick up such training on the job. Yet this perspective contradicts a fundamental principle of workforce development, which recognized the wider economic benefits arising from building a skilled workforce.
The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs.
An innovative public pilot in Long Beach has shown it is possible for gig work to benefit workers, employers, and the broader community. The Workers Lab, an organization that funds innovations for and with workers, and Pacific Gateway, the City of Long Beach’s public workforce board, have invested in a platform called WorkLB. The technology behind the platform, originally developed with the British Labor government, plays a matchmaking role by connecting employers and workers based on needs, skills, and schedules.
Pacific Gateway is demonstrating that flexible schedules and the opportunity to do short-term work can go hand in hand with decent earnings, protections, rights at work, and upward mobility. Moreover, the program shows that such opportunities can also benefit businesses and public agencies looking for workers and seeking to improve the workforce development system.
This simultaneously undermines the dominant narrative of a trade-off between flexibility and workers’ rights, and shows how government intervention can effectively address issues arising from the so-called Gig Economy.
The Long Beach model allows Pacific Gateway to either act as, or delegate the responsibility to vet and oversee workers, ensure proper payroll management, provide healthcare, abide by labor law, and pay for liability insurance.
To participate, employers must be willing to pay the local minimum wage (currently $16.50 per hour in Long Beach), with a markup of 2.5% ($0.40 per hr) to help defray the costs of administration. For workers, this unique model helps them find the best work opportunities based on their skills, interests, and scheduling needs. Whether short or long-term, these work opportunities are W-2 jobs providing good wages, benefits, and labor protections. All that, and flexibility.
Pacific Gateway credentials workers through its formal intake process, awarding them “badges” to market their skills. Unlike traditional, for-profit staffing agencies, which have also proliferated in the gig economy space, that treat workers’ skill levels as proprietary data, Pacific Gateway makes this information readily available to prospective employers.
By using a public workforce agency in this staffing agency role, Pacific Gateway is fulfilling the original intention of the federal Employment Services program—to match workers with employers, connect workers to the appropriate training opportunities, and then place them in actual jobs.
In a reversal of gig work common sense, WorkLB’s app allows workers to review their employers, which helps ensure that Pacific Gateway recruits employers providing good jobs rather than placing workers in exploitative and precarious work. While the app currently does not allow employers to rate the workers, it enables them to track the progression of a worker to incentivize full-time work conversion where desired.
Participating workers in Long Beach report high satisfaction with the program, saying that it provides quality jobs with transparent pay, clear expectations, and legal protections and allows them to demonstrate their skills to prospective employers. Employers get a vetted, skilled workforce for on-demand jobs that serve their longer-term workforce needs. The federal workforce system was created to do this, but perpetually lacks the funding to do so at the appropriate scale.
Given its success thus far, there is growing interest in adopting similar pilots in other parts of the country. Additionally, these pilots may provide a salient avenue for much-needed workforce development at the state and local level that meets both workers' and employers’ needs, especially as the current Trump administration slashes federal programs, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and mandate greater work requirements that may impact state and local workforce funding. However, the greatest challenge is funding these pilots, especially as federal funding is cut. The Long Beach pilot was primarily funded through philanthropic dollars, but given the need to scale future efforts, public funding is critical. Now is the time for states and localities to think creatively, whether by developing sector-based partnerships with employers and unions where all partners have “skin in the game,” or identifying other public funding streams, to support this growing workforce.
Workers often accept low-paid and precarious gig jobs because they need them to shore up failing household budgets while juggling complicated schedules. The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs, thereby benefiting workers, families, and the wider community.
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Casar-Tlaib Bill Would Ban Corporations From Using AI to Set Prices, Wages
"The idea that employers would leverage surveillance data to exploit a worker in a desperate position and offer them a lower wage is appalling," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Jul 23, 2025
A pair of U.S. House progressives have introduced a bill that would stop companies from using artificial intelligence to set prices and wages based on the personal information of customers and workers.
The "Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act," introduced Wednesday by Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), is an effort to curb the growing trend of "surveillance-based price setting," where companies use data from customers to determine how much they are willing to pay for a service.
According to a recent report by the Federal Trade Commission, "Retailers frequently use people's personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage."
Casar said that "giant corporations should not be allowed to jack up your prices or lower your wages using data they got spying on you."
"Whether you know it or not, you may already be getting ripped off by corporations using your personal data to charge you more," he added. "This problem is only going to get worse, and Congress should act before this becomes a full-blown crisis."
Earlier this month, Delta Airlines announced a pilot program using an AI model to charge individual consumers the maximum amount it determines they are willing to pay for plane tickets. Delta has described the change as "a full reengineering of how we price, and how we will be pricing in the future."
Other companies have been accused of using similar forms of "surge pricing."
Uber, which has been suspected of jacking up prices on riders with low cellphone batteries, pioneered the method. Kroger and Walmart have used digital price tags on goods to rapidly change prices, and Kroger also says it is using facial recognition to track customers in order to offer targeted coupons.
Amazon has been accused of setting personalized prices based on customers' location and browsing history, and the Princeton Review has even been caught charging greater amounts for SAT prep services in Asian communities.
Companies also frequently use hidden algorithms based on personal data to pay workers different wages for the same work—an especially pervasive practice in gig economy jobs like rideshare and delivery driving.
A 2024 report by the Roosevelt Institute found that these algorithms were also being applied to nurses, who were offered shifts by an opaque algorithm based on who was willing to work for the lowest pay and a number of other undisclosed factors.
"It is shameful that companies would use our neighbors' sensitive personal information against them to raise prices," said Tlaib. "The idea that employers would leverage surveillance data to exploit a worker in a desperate position and offer them a lower wage is appalling."
The bill still allows companies to change prices for individuals based on certain circumstances. For example, they would still be allowed to offer discounts to certain groups like college students, veterans, and senior citizens or enact loyalty programs.
Likewise, wage-earners would still be allowed to receive overtime pay or bonuses for good work or have their salaries changed to accommodate the cost of living.
The bill instead targets companies that use underhanded and invasive tactics to take advantage of their customers' and employees' desperation.
"This bill draws a clear line in the sand: Companies can offer discounts and fair wages—but not by spying on people," said the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "Surveillance-based price gouging and wage setting are exploitative practices that deepen inequality and strip consumers and workers of dignity."
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Hope Is Not a Villain—But This Kind of Hope Is
We need a movement ready to restore America to the path of becoming the country we've dreamed of being for centuries. Not the fantasy of individual escape, but the reality of collective power.
Jul 04, 2025
I dropped out of high school. Got my GED. Worked as a general contractor in East Tennessee. Built things with my hands. Fixed busted systems. Lived paycheck to paycheck. That was my life, and for most of it, hope meant something real. Hope that a decent day's work would pay the bills. That a roof over your head and a future for your kids wasn't too much to ask.
But somewhere along the way, hope got hijacked.
Now hope looks like scratching off lottery tickets. Buying crypto hoping to get rich quick. Praying your side hustle turns into the next big thing. We don't hope to fix the system anymore.
We hope to escape it. And that kind of hope will kill us.
You see it everywhere. People identify with billionaires instead of their neighbors. They defend the rich because maybe someday they'll be rich too. They talk about taxes like they're one lucky break away from needing a tax shelter. The Hunger Games tried to warn us, and instead we started dressing like the Capitol.
I don't want to kill hope. I want to reclaim it.
Look at the numbers. The average person has a better chance of getting struck by lightning than becoming a billionaire. The odds of winning the lottery? About 1 in 292 million. Meanwhile, the odds of having medical debt? Nearly 1 in 3 Americans. The odds of being laid off or priced out or wiped out by rent? Closer to 1 in 2.
So why do we still believe? Because facing the truth is harder. The truth that the game is rigged. That the rungs of the ladder we were promised have been sawed off; the American Dream got replaced by American Denial.
Hope used to mean something different. It used to mean collective progress. Solidarity. We marched for better wages. We fought for civil rights. We built schools and unions and co-ops. We didn't dream of becoming the landlord. We fought to make rent fair for everyone. But now even our dreams are privatized. We traded shared ambition for selfish aspiration. And we're losing the plot.
I grew up hearing stories from my grandfather, who was one of 13 kids in a sharecropping family. One generation later, he owned 40 acres, grew tobacco, raised cattle, had houses to rent out to his kids. That wasn't just personal grit. That happened because America was actually building things back then. The TVA brought electricity to our region. The interstate highways connected us to the world. There were pathways to a better life that didn't require winning the lottery.
The pathways to prosperity were dismantled. I know because I watched it happen. My woodworking company made furniture components for Lazy Boy, Berkline, Universal, and Vaughn Furniture before NAFTA and CAFTA gutted us. It wasn't just my business. Our whole region got hollowed out while corporate America chased cheap labor overseas.
The pathways to prosperity were dismantled... Our whole region got hollowed out while corporate America chased cheap labor overseas.
The knowledge walked out the door with the last shift supervisor. Towns that had built middle-class prosperity around making things became ghost towns. Skills that took generations to develop got thrown away because some MBA in New York decided labor was cheaper in Mexico. We went from a country that made things to a country that made money off money. From building wealth to extracting it.
Now what do we have? The gig economy. Work three jobs and still can't afford rent. Get told to hustle harder while billionaires build rocket ships. We're supposed to be grateful for the privilege of driving for Uber while the guy who owns Uber buys his fourth mansion.
The whole system is designed to keep us hoping for individual escape instead of collective change. Keep buying those scratch-offs. Keep believing that if you just work hard enough, grind long enough, maybe you'll hit it big. Meanwhile, the people who rigged the game are laughing all the way to the bank.
They want us to think like temporary embarrassed millionaires instead of permanent working people. They want us to defend their tax cuts because someday we might need them too. They want us to vote against our own interests because we've been sold a dream that we're all just one good idea away from joining the club.
The whole system is designed to keep us hoping for individual escape instead of collective change.
But here's what they don't want us to figure out—we're stronger together than any of us could ever be alone. The TVA didn't happen because one guy got lucky. The interstate highways didn't get built because somebody won the lottery. Social Security didn't happen because workers hoped to get rich. These things happened because people organized, fought, and built something together.
I don't want to kill hope. I want to reclaim it. I want a hope that says we can fix this country, not just get rich enough to escape its problems. I want a hope that builds instead of bets. That organizes instead of idolizes. That sees neighbors instead of competitors.
These things happened because people organized, fought, and built something together.
I want hope that understands we don't need to wait for permission from billionaires to make things better. We don't need to hope they'll trickle some wealth down to us. We can build our own wealth by building things that matter. We can create our own prosperity by investing in each other.
What we need is a movement that's ready to do the big things, the hard things. A movement that understands you have to impeach Supreme Court justices who violate constitutional norms or are corrupt. That you have to take a DOGE-like approach to removing revolving door lobbyists from corrupted institutions like the FDA and the SEC. That you have to go hard against the very people who will stand in your way—the same people we're going to see standing in the way of Zohran Mamdani in New York if he's elected mayor. And too often those folks have a D by their name.
We need a movement ready to restore America to the path of becoming the country we've dreamed of being for centuries. Not the fantasy of individual escape, but the reality of collective power. Not lottery tickets and crypto dreams, but the hard work of building something that actually serves the people who live here.
That's the kind of hope worth having. That's the kind of hope that actually works. And that's the kind of hope that scares the hell out of the people running things now.
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Workers Built the Platform Economy, But They’re Not Seeing Its Rewards
By classifying workers as contractors, platform companies avoid paying core employment obligations while retaining tight control over how the work is done.
May 29, 2025
Alejandro G. thought that driving full-time for Uber in Houston offered freedom—flexible hours, quick cash, and time to care for his young son. But that promise faded fast.
“There are hours when I make $20,” he told me. “And there are hours when I make $2.” As his pay dropped, he pawned his computer and camera, began rationing the insulin he takes to manage his diabetes—putting his health at risk—and started driving seven days a week, often late into the night, just to break even.
Alejandro, whose real name is withheld for his privacy, is one of millions of workers powering a billion-dollar labor model built on legal loopholes. Companies like Uber insist they are tech platforms, not employers, and that their workers are independent contractors. This sleight of hand allows them to sidestep minimum wage laws, paid sick leave, and other workplace protections, while shifting the financial risks and responsibilities of employment onto the workers. It also lets them avoid employer taxes, draining funds from public coffers.
If gig workers were properly classified, public companies would have to disclose pay data, showing just how far below the median these workers earn, and how high executive compensation soars above them.
A new Human Rights Watch report looks at seven major platform companies operating in the U.S.—Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber—and finds that their labor model violates international human rights standards. These companies promise flexibility and opportunity, but the reality for many workers is far more precarious. In a survey of 127 platform workers in Texas, we found that after subtracting expenses and benefits, the median hourly pay was just $5.12, including tips. This is nearly 30% below the federal minimum wage, and about 70% below a living wage in Texas.
Seventy-five percent of workers we surveyed said they had struggled to pay for housing in the past year. Thirty-five percent said they couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense. Over a third had been in a work-related car accident. Many said they sold possessions, relied on food stamps, or borrowed from family and friends to get by. Their labor keeps the system running—but the system isn’t built to work for them.
By classifying workers as contractors, platform companies avoid paying core employment obligations while retaining tight control over how the work is done. The platforms often use algorithms and automated systems to assign jobs, set pay rates, monitor performance, and deactivate workers without warning. In our survey, 65 workers said they feared being cut off from a platform, and 40 had already experienced it. Nearly half were later cleared of wrongdoing.
Companies use incentives that feel like rewards but function more like traps. Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash dangle “quests,” “challenges,” and “surges” to push workers to stay on a shift for longer or hit quotas. These schemes lure workers into chasing bonuses that rarely reflect the true cost of the work. One Uber driver in Houston said, “They are like puppet masters. They psychologically manipulate you.”
Access to higher-paying gigs is also conditioned on behavior. Platforms use customer ratings and performance scores to shape who gets the best jobs. One Shipt worker in Michigan said her pay plummeted immediately after she received two four-star reviews, down from her usual five. Ratings are hard to challenge, and recovering from a low score can take weeks. Workers feel forced to accept every job and appease every customer, reinforcing a system that rewards compliance over fairness.
These aren’t the conditions of self-employment. They’re the conditions of control.
This labor model also drains public resources. In Texas alone, Human Rights Watch estimates that misclassification of platform workers in ride share, food delivery, and in-home services cost the state over $111 million in unemployment insurance contributions between 2020 and 2022. These are public funds that could have strengthened social protection or public services. Instead, they’re absorbed into corporate profits—a quiet transfer of public wealth into private hands.
In 2024, Uber reported $43.9 billion in revenue and nearly $10 billion in net income, calling the fourth quarter its “strongest ever.” DoorDash pulled in $10.72 billion, up 24% from the previous year. Combined, their market valuation exceeds $250 billion.
But workers are pushing back, and policymakers are starting to listen. From June 2 to 13, the 113th session of the International Labour Conference—the United Nations-backed forum where global labor standards are negotiated—will convene to debate a binding treaty on decent work in the platform economy. The message is clear: Workers are demanding rules that protect their rights.
The U.S. can start by updating employment classification standards and adopting clear criteria to determine whether a platform worker is truly independent. We also need greater transparency. If gig workers were properly classified, public companies would have to disclose pay data, showing just how far below the median these workers earn, and how high executive compensation soars above them.
This isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about making sure new forms of work don’t replicate old forms of exploitation or create new ones, by hiding them behind an app.
Alejandro doesn’t need an algorithm to tell him when to work harder. He has a right to a wage he can live on, protections he can count on, and a system that doesn’t punish him for getting sick, injured, or speaking up.
He and millions like him built the platform economy. It’s time they shared more than the burden.
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New Report Sheds Light on the Pitfalls of AI-Powered 'Gig Nursing'
"These apps are a symptom of broken healthcare infrastructure that is now victim to corporate takeovers. Failing to act on both fronts poses risks to our healthcare system and the workers who power it," wrote one of the researchers.
Dec 17, 2024
While gig work is fairly common in a number of sectors in the American economy, a brief released Tuesday by the progressive-leaning think tank the Roosevelt Institute details how the gig model now has its tentacles in the healthcare industry, and argues it is creating new hazards for workers and patients.
The brief, authored by Groundwork Collaborative fellow Katie Wells and King's College London lecturer Funda Ustek Spilda, sounds the alarm over "on-demand nursing firms" such as CareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, ShiftMed, and others which have gained traction by promising hospitals more control and nurses and nursing assistants more flexibility.
Practically speaking, these "new Uber-style apps use algorithmic scheduling, staffing, and management technologies—software often touted by companies as cutting-edge 'AI,' or artificial intelligence—to connect understaffed medical facilities with nearby nurses and nursing assistants looking for work," according to the brief.
The authors, whose research was largely based on interviews with 29 gig nurses, argued that these apps "encourage nurses to work for less pay," do not offer nurses clarity when it comes to scheduling and amount or type of work, are not sufficiently concerned with worker safety, and "can threaten patient well-being by placing nurses in unfamiliar clinical environments with no onboarding or facility training."
These platforms are also using the same tactics as the ride-hailing service Uber when it comes to lobbying state legislatures in order to shield themselves from labor regulations, according to the authors, who noted that larger hospital systems in the country have included gig nurses in their operations since 2016.
The researchers argued that while the rates on a platform like ShiftKey can be higher for nurses and nurses assistants, nursing on-demand platforms can create a race to the bottom for wages: "The nurses and nursing assistants who use these apps must pay fees to bid on shifts, and they win those bids by offering to work for lower hourly rates than their fellow workers."
When the nursing on-demand firms classify the workers as self-employed, nurses and nursing assistants are also exposed to higher risk because they are "excluded from the protections of local, state, and federal law on minimum wage, overtime pay, workers' compensation, retirement benefits, employment-based health insurance, and paid sick days."
Workers are also rated based on facility feedback and determinations made by the algorithm, and can be penalized if they cancel a shift because they are sick or have a conflict, per the report.
"In at least one case, a nursing assistant went into work at a hospital while sick with Covid-19 because she could not figure out how to cancel a shift without lowering her rating," according to the authors.
By way of background, the authors of the brief also argue that the often-invoked "nursing shortage" is actually misleading term. In fact, there is no shortage of available nurses and nursing assistants, but rather a "growing number of nurses and nursing assistants who refuse to accept chronically understaffed, underpaid, unsafe, and high-stress workplaces," according to the brief, which cites outside research.
In fact, many of the workers interviewed said they would continue working for nursing on demand services because broadly speaking they like the work. According to the brief, interviewees said "over and over again how important flexible schedules are to their lives, especially their own caregiving, be it for children, spouses, or elders"—though the authors of the study wrote that this does not mean the concerns expressed by the workers are not worth paying attention to.
The rise of gig nursing is taking place on the backdrop of increasing corporate ownership over the healthcare industry writ large, including the rise of private equity ownership of medical facilities and medical staffing agencies.
"Policymakers need to be proactive and step in to regulate these platforms and provide proper labor protections for all nurses, gig and non-gig alike," said Wells in a Tuesday statement. "But these apps are a symptom of broken healthcare infrastructure that is now victim to corporate takeovers. Failing to act on both fronts poses risks to our healthcare system and the workers who power it."
Wells also told The Guardian that the gig companies don't release data and the industry is unregulated, meaning the true extent to which the U.S. healthcare system is leaning on gig nurses is unknown—but she said it is clearly a growing trend.
These on-demand nursing apps can also have a negative impact on patients, according to sources the authors spoke with. One nurse recounted that "there have been times when I've been unable to access patient records or find supply closets."
"Other workers report that the lack of management and resources can result in major safety lapses for patients, such as gig nurses not being able to get updated information on patient medications or instructions about whether patients need help with feeding," the authors wrote.
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