Human Rights Watch has made explicit accusations of major companies that manage digital services in the United States of America by circumventing workers and depriving them of their rights.
The organization said in a report published today, entitled “The Perfume of Temporary Action”, that these companies mistakenly classify the people who work as “independent contractors”, which deprives them of their rights as workers.
The report is subject to the practices of seven major investigation companies, namely Amazon Flex, Dordash, “Favor”, “InstaCart”, “Lyft” as well as “SHIPT”, and Uber.
He recorded that these companies claim that they provide “flexibility” at work, but in reality “they often pay workers less than the minimum wages in force in the state or city.”
The organization revealed that 6 of these companies use “non -transparent algorithms to distribute tasks and determine wages, which means that workers do not know how much they will get until they finish performing work.”
Lina Simet, a first researcher in poverty affairs and inequality with “Human Rights Watch”, said that the digital platforms have created a commercial model that enables them to evade “their responsibilities as employers working while keeping workers under a strict algorithm” based on decisions described as “uneven and unexpected.”
Simit added that the aforementioned companies provide “promises of flexibility at work, but they leave workers at the mercy of unstable wages and less than the minimum, without social protection and in constant fear of losing their work without any means of challenge.”
The organization pointed out that the report was based on interviews with 95 platform workers in Texas and 12 other American states, in addition to a questionnaire that included 127 people in Texas.
The results showed that the wages of Texas workers are 30% lower than the minimum minimum, and 70% less than the “living wages”, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She also highlighted that workers in these companies earn $ 16.90 per hour, but half of this income is spent on the costs related to work, such as fuel, maintenance and insurance, and pointed out that the net income after calculating the advantages falls to 5.12 dollars per hour.
But more than that, the report recorded that some workers said that they did not win anything after the costs, and 75% said that they faced difficulties in paying the rent during the year, and the majority of them faced difficulties in buying food and paying electricity and water bills, while more than a third of them could not confront a healthy emergency costing $ 400.
The report pointed out that the workers live in a permanent fear that their accounts are disabled from the applications, which are often done without explanation or any means of objection, as about half of those whose accounts were disabled were subsequently acquitted, which the report counted an indication of the high percentage of the wrong separation decisions.
In front of the difficult situation of workers, the aforementioned companies make large profits estimated at billions of dollars.
Human Rights Watch called on the US Department of Labor and other bodies, such as the Federal Trade Committee and the working committees at the level of the state, to take urgent measures to protect the “platform workers” and ensure their right to trade union organization.
