Cory Doctorow

And they certainly don't get like free kombucha and massages and a surgeon who'll freeze their eggs so they can work through their fertile years.

They're in a factory in China with suicide nets around it.

But

An example that kind of pulls this all together, how you get monopoly, regulatory capture, the degradation of labor with technology that relies on blocks and interoperability.

I think we could do no better than to talk about nurses.

And I'm going to be making reference here to the work of Veena Dubal.

She's a legal scholar who coined a very important term, algorithmic wage discrimination.

In America, hospitals preferentially hire nurses through apps, and they do so as contractors.

So hiring contractors means that you can avoid the unionization of nurses.

And when a nurse signs on to get a shift through one of these apps, the app is able to buy the nurse's credit history.

And the reason for that...

is that the U.S.

government has not passed a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law that made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rental habits.

Every other form of privacy invasion of your consumer rights is lawful under federal law.

And so among the things that data brokers will sell, anyone who shows up with a credit card

is how much credit card debt is any other person carrying and how delinquent is it?

And based on that, the nurses are charged a kind of desperation premium.

The more debt they're carrying, the more overdue that debt is, the lower the wage that they're offered on the grounds that nurses who are facing economic privation and desperation will accept a lower wage to do the same job.

Now, this is not a novel insight.

Paying more desperate workers less money is a thing that you can find in like Tennessee Ernie Ford songs about 19th century coal bosses.