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Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Speaking of Labor Regulations in the Uber Economy What About Google?

     Hillary rightly discussed the issue of the Uber Economy in her recent speech.

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/07/hillary-clintons-speech-yesterday-shows.html

     Despite the response of Republican boo birds the point is not to suppress the UE but merely bring labor laws and regulations in line with it.

     Unless you believe that the only reason the UE is successful is because it can skirt regulations then this should be a feature not a bug. Of course the conservatives won't see it that way.

     However it occurs to me that in line with this goal of bringing regulations up to date with UE something has to be done about Google.

     Let me be clear-I love Google and have no desire to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs as conservatives would claim.

     I'm all for Google and if anything see the privacy issues surrounding it as overblown-or at least not a concern of mine. I like as much information to be available and public as possible. I guess between knowledge and privacy there may be tradeoffs but nothing I've seen persuades me that I wouldn't rather err on the side of too little privacy than too little knowledge.

    Where I do have a bone to pick with Google however is it's treatment of publishers.

    I've related the story a number of times of how Google without explanation closed my account-and held on to the $400 dollars it owed me back in early 2013. This is something that happens to publishers every day. Google just sends a generic message that you 'might' be a danger to its advertisers and drops you.

   It helpfully tells you to appeal but this garners another form letter that sheds no new light.

   Google claims it can't discuss what you have done wrong because supposedly their detection methods are top secret-if people found out how they detect fraud they'd figure out how to beat it.

   I've noted that other platforms don't do what Google does.

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-come-chitika-treats-its-publishers.html

   Chitika and other platforms have to treat their publishers better but then these aren't such great platforms. The payouts are lousy.

    Revenue Hits can be a good alternative-but the problem there is that it's ads can be a bit aggressive.

   It turns out that with Google's paranoia about cheating and click farms it has itself been cheating.

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/for-google-adsense-lawsuit-whos-time.html

   It would just randomly close lots of accounts just when they were due to be paid. That was my experience as well.

   The reason I think this is a vital issue for the UE is because of the argument that we are living in a UE utopia that workers have to adjust to. Gone are the days when you could get out of college-forget college you could get out of high school-find a well paying job at the local GM, GE, or IBM, or what have you and have a 30 or 40 year career that gave you all the money and security you could ever need.

   In the UE workers have to be nimble and will have many different employers not just in their lifetime or even the same year but the same week.

  http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-i-grow-up-i-want-to-be-like-nick.html

  http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/whats-next-for-uber-economy-part-2.html

  One kind of employment opportunity then is to do what I do-be a blogger. Don't get me wrong I don't do this only for the money. But it would be helpful if I could make some. Google's publishers are it's lifeline.

  It makes billions of dollars in revenue thanks to their content-and the advertisers. While it's a good development that Uber is being made to call their employees what they are rather than contractors, I think that Google should be force to do the same. When it generates all that ad revenue from your blog you are really their employees.

 I think that's a legal argument worth considering. I mean I think that Google's publishers probably have a better gripe than Huff Post writers do against Arianna Huffington.

 If workers have to adjust to the UE then Google should have to at a minimum be held accountable for it's fraud detection process. It claims it can't reveal it but I think it should be compelled to by a judge or perhaps by Congress.

 With its history of fraud this is only right. It is also a labor rights issue in the new UE.

   

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