Algorithmic Wage Discrimination
On the newest episode of the podcast we discuss writing in the Field Notes 1943 edition but not before spending a few minutes on winter style icon Adrien Brody.
This week, I read and enjoyed Molly Aitken’s compelling short story, “This Is How It Happens.” It was written in a spare style that made it difficult to put down.
The quote below is the most interesting thing I heard this week. It’s an infuriating view of health care workers being hired via app. I told my teenager about it and he told me to share it with more people.
I’m going to be making a reference here to the work of Veena Dubal, 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. 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.
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. So among the things that data brokers will sell to anyone who shows up with a credit card is how much credit card debt any other person is carrying, and how delinquent it is.
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.
- Cory Doctorow, “We Didn’t Ask for an Internet Like This” The Ezra Klein Show