A belief that the rise of so-called “platform capitalism” and the classification of working people in those sectors as “independent contractors” mean that the concepts of employer and employee are out of date appears to be on the rise.

But a working person is still a working person, no matter the legal arrangement.

The basic binary of capitalist society, whichever way one wishes to describe it, remains capitalists and workers, bourgeoisie and proletariat, employers or employees. It is certainly true that the working class today is not primarily blue-collar manual workers, but that wasn’t necessarily true even in the early 20th century, when white-collar work was already becoming common. Just because you sit in an office in front of a computer it doesn’t mean you aren’t a worker having surplus value extracted from you.

An argument I have read asserts that people who work for “platforms” such as Uber, Doordash or Lyft are not simply workers but have a dual status, as workers and at the same time as “entrepreneurs.” As workers these people scramble to make ends meet in a fragmented labor market but as entrepreneurs are continually branding themselves and marketing their skills. This “dual identity” supposedly blurs the distinction between employer and employee and between labor and capital. That is simply an unfortunate retreat from reality. Precarious workers — precarious is precisely the condition of platform workers and freelancers — are not part “entrepreneurs,” they are workers, plain and simple, but workers without regular employment.

The precarious freelancer or gig worker does not own any means of production, does not control his or her work and is answerable to an employer, even if for the short term or temporarily. The relationship of worker to employer does not change in any way. What is different is that the employer, or capitalist, can much more easily remove an employee than the employer could a regular employee.

An exploited worker is an exploited worker

That a workforce that is scattered and remote, rather than sharing the same space as was common until recently, undoubtedly makes organizing more difficult. That is a challenge to be faced. The conception being critiqued here would have us believe that precarious workers are “not Marx’s proletariat” but rather something new.

There is nothing new about it. What is new is that precarious work has spread to what we commonly think of as “middle class” or “white collar” work. And being a precarious worker has always been the norm when we look at the working class on a global basis. An Uber driver or any other platform worker is immediately subject to an algorithm rather than a direct boss, but that algorithm offers no accountability and no explanation. The algorithm is not some neutral entity that fell out of the skies; it is connected to a faceless corporation seeking to maximize profitability. The boss — the capitalist — is still there! The “algorithm” replaces nothing.

Uber, like other platforms, is not a disembodied entity somewhere in the clouds, it is a capitalist enterprise that ruthlessly exploits its workers. That those workers who are called “independent contractors” have some control over their working hours in no way changes their status. The app is controlled and owned by Uber, not by the driver, nor does the driver have control; Uber can take the app away at any time at its discretion. Thus the means of production are firmly in the hands of the capitalist and the worker is selling their labor power and in this case selling their labor power for an uncertain and ever changing amount — a variable they also have no control over.

“Sharing economy” is the euphemism often used to designate the phenomenon of working people obtaining work through apps. “Sharing economy” enterprises designate employees as “independent contractors” so that workers are left without legal protections, while competition is undercut through insisting that laws and regulations don’t apply to them. This is not new or “innovative.” But it is Silicon Valley companies that are doing this — so, hurray!, it’s now exciting and, oh yes, disruptive! Quaint, archaic standards such as minimum wages and labor- and consumer-law protections are so old-fashioned that Silicon Valley billionaires are doing us all a favor by disrupting our ability to keep them. High-tech exploitation is still exploitation.

A precarious worker is in the same class as a salaried worker in a stable, formal job. They are exploited in the same way through the extraction of surplus value, the basis on which the capitalist system rests. Divisions among workers have always existed and propaganda designed to foster divisions and alienation have always existed; indeed, it must exist from the perspective of capitalists because a united working class would overthrow the system. Capitalists — financiers and industrialists — know this, which is why so much effort is always put into dividing workers. There is nothing new here.

All the workers who are in this situation are workers — proletarians, to use the traditional technical term. They are all, again, people without possession of the means of production who must sell their labor power and in these cases sell their labor power under conditions heavily weighted toward employers — the bourgeoisie who own the means of production, or, in the case of these platforms, who own and profit from the app. The Uber driver is getting only a small portion of the revenue generated — the driver has surplus value extracted from them exactly as a regularly employed worker in a formal setting does. That is how capitalism operates. The capitalist pays the worker only a fraction of the value of what he or she produces. From that surplus value extracted comes profit. A capitalist who didn’t extract surplus value wouldn’t be a capitalist.

Informal workers outnumber those with regular jobs

The belief that the traditional framework of class no longer applies is a fallacy on its face: A precarious worker is still a worker, still an employee or a proletarian, simply one without a regular paycheck. Most of the world’s workers are precarious workers. It is those with full-time, regular employment who constitute a minority of the world’s workers.

A 2016 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that nearly half of the world’s workers — 1.5 billion people — hold “vulnerable employment.” This total includes subsistence and informal workers, and unpaid family workers. This vast cohort (the “reserve army of labor” although the ILO never uses such direct terminology) will not be getting smaller in the foreseeable future. In one-third of the world’s countries, the “precariat” constitutes at least two-thirds of the total workforce.

The number of precarious workers, however, is likely higher than what the ILO calculates. In their book The Endless Crisis, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney estimate that the true size of the precariat is actually significantly larger than those with regular employment. Adding together the categories of the unemployed, the vulnerably employed, and the economically inactive population in prime working ages (25-54) and add them together, they calculate that the global reserve army could be as large as 2.4 billion in contrast to the 1.4 billion who have regular employment.

There has never been a time when working people haven’t been divided along various lines, including a minuscule percentage of workers with relative privilege in terms of job security and wages, such as the “labor aristocracy” Lenin spoke of at the dawn of the 20th century. Capitalists have always tried to divide us on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, immigration status, religion, etc.

Stand up, fight back together

How do we fight back against these developments? Do we throw away the tools of past labor struggles or, as those arguing that concepts of workers and employers are somehow relics of the past, form “decentralized, flexible, networked forms of organizing that reflect the fragmented reality of modern class dynamics” that would eschew leaders or a centralized structure. Organizing in this way “does not seek to recreate the industrial strikes or union halls of the past.”

The strike and the union hall have been two key tools enabling workers to defend themselves. The answer to the decline of union membership is to rebuild unions as fighting instruments rather than the collaborationist “business unionism” of past decades. It is not to see union as somehow passé. The strike is a potent weapon in the hands of workers. Throwing away this tool means throwing away the tool that capitalists most fear and that has brought the most results. And when a strike raises wages and working conditions at one company, then competing companies are compelled to match that at risk of losing employees. A strike elevates whole groups of workers, not only those who struck.

Small groups of people without leadership can’t create, much less sustain, the level of organization necessary to prevail over what will be a very long struggle. Effectively, this “decentralized” organizing is not a model for a united front, but rather an anarchist approach of small groups each doing their own thing. That has never worked. There is a reason there has never been an anarchist revolution. There is a reason that the union movements of the 1930s were organized by socialists and communists who understood that organization is the key to a successful movement.

The solution to the atomization of working people is not to have an atomization of small groups but to find ways to organize these atomized and precarious workers into a solid movement, an organized movement with powerful numbers behind them that understand its common class status and subordination with those with regular, formal employment, and that those with regular, formal employment understand they are part of the same working class as the precarious. Such leadership should largely come from within. Giving in to atomization means giving in to the bosses.

The object of a capitalist corporation is to extract the maximum amount of profit, whether it is a traditional business or a platform, and underpaying workers is a primary method toward that maximization. High-tech wrapping does not, and should not, disguise that reality. Organize!