Veteran director Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You is a ‘wrenching tale of ... how the gig economy screws over the people it promises to save’
18 MAY 2019 - 08:29 AGENCY STAFF
Cannes — Veteran British director Ken Loach was tipped for a third Cannes win on Friday for a powerful film which puts Amazon and other tech giants in the dock over their alleged exploitation of workers.
Critics hailed Sorry We Missed You, his heart-breaking story of an overworked delivery driver as a “wrenching tale of the way we live now and how the gig economy screws over the people it promises to save”.
The film — shot in the north-eastern English city of Newcastle, like his last Palme d’Or winning film I, Daniel Blake — takes “a white van man” and turns him into a martyr of out-of-control capitalism.
Hollywood bible Variety, not normally a fan of left-wing activist directors, said “the times have caught up with Loach and they have pushed him to the top of his game. He’s 82 years old, and he is now making films that connect, with a nearly karmic sense of timing, to the social drama of our moment.”
The Guardian gave it five stars and declared that “this brilliant film will focus minds ... in modern Britain, the land of zero-hours vassalage and service-economy serfdom.”
Loach, whose arm was in a sling after putting out his shoulder, said he and scriptwriter Paul Laverty had found Amazon drivers working with broken limbs. He said the system of zero-hour contracts and false “self-employed owner-driver franchisees” used by tech giants ranging from Uber to Deliveroo, creates massive misery by “putting all the risk on the workers ... who are made to exploit themselves”.
Sorry We Missed You shows how the relentless demands of the gig economy wreck a family of grafters. For their part, the tech companies say they offer the best working conditions possible for their workforce and provide much-needed jobs in often rundown and neglected areas.
Destroying families
“We are supposed to work to provide for our families but for millions of us, work deprives us from spending time with our loved ones,” said Laverty, Loach’s regular creative partner.
The writer said he interviewed an Amazon driver on the day its owner Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world. “His skin was grey, his eyes were red. He was absolutely exhausted,” Laverty said. “When I showed the driver the news, his jaw dropped. He realised he was one of hundreds of thousands of drivers across the world, a little drip going into the Amazon river.”
In the film, a delivery driver and his wife who cares for elderly and disabled people in their homes, work long, grueling days to hit inhumane targets.
Loach said the system is now stacked massively against working people, “who can be turned on and off like tap”, and warned that this is fueling dangerous populist anger.
He said the extreme right “rise when the soil is manured with this precarious work — that’s where people’s anger is coming from. People speak of the extreme right and left. I don’t see the extreme left. Where is it? I see the extreme right who thrive on anger and discontent. They say the person to blame is the poorest person next to you, or someone who looks different, or comes from another country. The extreme right thrives on fear. The left thrives on confidence. If you are confident you say, ‘Yes, we can change things.’ The right thrives on anxiety and insecurity.”
‘This system kills’
Debbie Honeywood, a teacher who plays the role of the van driver’s wife and one of several amateurs Loach cast, said three out of four children living in poverty in the UK have working parents.
“We know there is something badly wrong and intolerable about life now,” Loach said. “We know that healthcare and the way our old people are looked after is not right, and why, when we buy online, does everything come in a van? We cannot sustain that.”
The filmmaker said the family in his film, like most who work in the gig economy, are caught in a trap.
“There is no escape, the system has trapped them. We met people who work with broken limbs who drive with a broken leg and arm. There was one appalling case of a man who died because he couldn’t stop work for his hospital appointments because of the debt. This system kills.”
But Loach was sanguine on whether his film will change anything. His last film I, Daniel Blake on the injustice and cruelty of the British social welfare system, won the top prize at Cannes and was debated in parliament.
“But the government hasn’t given an inch. It is still as cruel. They still use hunger as a weapon. Charity food banks have increased in the last year alone by 18%. That will not change because they have to show that not being able to support yourself is a crime.”
Sidmouth's Repair Café - part of an international movement
PUBLISHED: 07:00 12 May 2019 | UPDATED: 09:14 13 May 2019
A youngster tries her hand at one of the many Repair Cafes in the world.
Repair Cafés are opening up all over the world, in schools, churches and youth centres.
At one Belgian college, 'dysfunctional devices' belonging to members of the community are brought in and repaired by students. As the head said: "It helps them enhance their skills, while raising their awareness on issues of sustainability."
Martine Postma, director of Repair Café International also says it's about education: "Our volunteers are happy to show their neighbours the basics of repairing, but the real change will come when repair skills are put on the curriculum once more."
At Sidmouth's Repair Café, it's also not just about fixing stuff. It's also about showing people why things have broken down. And if spare parts are needed, then advice is always given - and so even those whose gadget isn't immediately fixed leave happy.
The next Repair Café is on Saturday, May 25, 10am to 1pm, at the Youth Centre in Manstone Lane.
To read more features from East Devon Resident, click here.
Online repair communities are spreading repair knowledge online to place power back in the hands of consumers
When Jessa Jones’s twin daughters flushed her iPhone 4S down the toilet, she decided that she was going to fix it herself. She took the toilet apart in her backyard, retrieved the device, and then searched online for how to make it turn on again. On DIY fix-it forums, she was informed that the first step was to replace the battery. She did this with relative ease, but the phone wouldn’t charge, which suggested that the water had also seeped into the phone’s motherboard.
For most, this would mean giving up and going to the Apple store. But Jones was determined. She had no experience working with electronics but by trawling through online tutorials, she taught herself how to use a soldering iron and replace microscopic components inside the phone. She eventually succeeded and got the device working again.
Jones found the repair work satisfying, and repairing electronics became a new hobby. She started buying dead devices on Craigslist and refurbishing them to sell. Then she listed herself on eBay as a mail-in motherboard repairperson – within months, repair shops across the country were sending her micro-soldering jobs that were too complex for them.
Jones soon had more business than she could handle. After recruiting other stay-at-home moms in her neighborhood and teaching them electronics repair, she launched a small business from her dining room called MommyFixits. “Suddenly our play dates became moms sitting around the dining table fixing mailed-in iPhones,” she told me.
As Jones’s expertise grew, she discovered that technology manufacturers used underhanded techniques to discourage independent repair. Phone and tablet parts were glued together, causing components to break when pried apart. Schematics and manuals were copyrighted and kept under trade secret. Apple even used their own proprietary “pentalobe” screws, which cannot be removed with common screwdrivers.
Despite these barriers to repair, Jones knew that fixing things independently, instead of taking them back to the manufacturer, was almost always possible and often cheaper. To spread her knowledge, she started a YouTube channel called iPad Rehab, which offered step-by-step repair tutorials for other DIY enthusiasts.
One of Jones’s more popular videos was of her fixing “touch disease” on an iPhone 6, a common problem where the touch pad stops working. Jones told me that this issue was endemic in iPhone 6s due to a design error in the phone that allowed it to bend, meaning that a small component on the logic board would dislodge. When Apple customers took their faulty phones back to the Apple store, they were given a replacement at a reduced price. The problem, according to Jones, was that the new phone had precisely the same defect as the old one, and the “touch disease” would return, sometimes in a matter of days.
In her 30-minute video, Jones demonstrated how she could fix the cause of the problem by adding a tiny metal wire under one part of the logic board, which prevented the component from dislodging. “When people watched that video, they could see a real person opening up a phone, explaining how it works, and then fixing the problem. It was so different from the experience of the Apple shop, where a Genius disappears and comes back with a white box,” she said.
“My YouTube channel just raised awareness that real repair is possible.”
Jones, whose channel now has more than 115,000 followers, is part of a network of YouTube tinkerers who are spreading their repair knowledge online to place power back in the hands of consumers.
Kyle Wiens, co-founder of the online repair community iFixit, uses YouTube to broadcast “teardowns”, where he dismantles a device piece by piece to show users how everything inside works and its potential reparability. Louis Rossmann, a technician with a small repair shop in New York, has a channel with more than 800,000 followers, where he regularly posts videos of him repairing Apple computers. There are also hundreds of thousands of amateur videos, where people from around the world teach others how to repair washing machines, light fixtures, cars, pool filters, rice cookers, and so on.
According to Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group, this YouTube community is an integral part of a broader political movement that is attempting to wrest consumer agency from an increasingly consolidated electronics marketplace.
Proctor says that while in the past there was a legal balance between protecting manufacturers’ intellectual property and empowering consumers to tinker with, modify, and repair their own products, the rise of software in electronics has shifted power to manufacturers. Not only are the products more complex and harder to fix, the line between self-repair and hacking has become nebulous, meaning that manufacturers have been able to use digital copyright law to gain a legal monopoly over repair. This, in turn, has created a broader cultural anxiety around self-repair, a sense that when our devices malfunction, the problem can only be dealt with by so-called experts at a specific company.
According to Proctor, YouTube channels such as Jones’s are useful in disrupting this dynamic. “I frequently will talk to people who had something break on their phone and were told that they had to replace it with the manufacturer,” he said. “But then they go on YouTube and watch a video and realize that fixing it isn’t impossible, that you could learn how to or find someone who can.”
As a result of this, those at the forefront of the online repair community are sometimes met with hostility from manufacturers. Apple has brought suits against unauthorized repair shops and have had their intellectual property lawyers directly contacted some YouTube tinkerers.
This type of behavior has radicalized a number of YouTube repairers, including Jones and Rossmann, whose videos now often venture into right to repair advocacy. This places them in a growing coalition of consumer freedom advocates, farmers, hackers, and environmentalists who are pushing for legislation that will allow consumers to fix what they own and empower third-party independent repair shops. In the US, so far 20 states have expressed interest in this type of legislative reform, and Senator Elizabeth Warren in March called for a national right to repair bill, which, while specifically made for farmers wanting to repair their own tractors, would have broad repercussions for all technology manufacturers.
While such legislation would be a victory for consumer rights, more fundamentally, Jones sees the right to repair as an integral step in making people less alienated from the production process. “What we’re giving up when we lose the right to repair is this sense of investigation and wonder and tinkering,” she says. “We’re made to see our devices as if they are these sacrosanct objects but really, they’re just a battery and a screen, something that a stay-at-home mom can learn how to fix in her dining room.”
Sidmouth Repair Café – it's about building up relationships
PUBLISHED: 07:00 26 April 2019
Chris Dunford of Bradfords (second standing from the left, with members of the café team) and a table laden with materials and tools to help the fixers in their work.
The Repair Cafe movement has been growing over recent times and communities are benefiting
The Repair Café movement is gaining ground. Last month, the Café in Exeter repaired 263 items, breaking the world record for the highest number of items mended in one day.
The Sidmouth Café has not yet reached these heights, but last month was its most successful.
One satisfied customer was clearly pleased: “Two pairs of trousers expertly repaired and a much loved coat, which was a challenge but now looking in perfect condition again!”
All sorts of things are fixed at the Café – from printers and lawnmowers to teddies and toasters, with the Café now particularly able to help with broken computers.
The expert fixers have been helped by a generous donation of tools and materials from Bradfords Building Supplies. And as their manager Chris Dunford said when visiting the Café: “It's not just about repairs, it's about building up relationships and making friendships.”
The Repair Café is held every last Saturday of the month at the Youth Centre in Manstone Lane, Sidmouth.
Sidmouth Repair Café will be operating on Saturday, April 27.
For more features from East Devon Resident, click here
Qamishli, Syria—As the de facto chief negotiator of the liberated region called the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Ilham Ahmed, the Kurdish co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, has much on her mind. In recent months, she has traveled in the US and Europe, negotiating the future of a domain that is home to an estimated 5 to 6 million people, including a substantial portion of Syria’s 6.2 million internally displaced persons, and, now in addition, thousands of families implicated in Islamic State terrorism who are today living in refugee camps. As Ahmed continues delicate talks with the world’s superpowers over the status of this territory, its future is, to a certain degree, in her hands.
With determination in her eyes and a furrowed brow, her face bears witness to this formidable responsibility. But riding in her black armored utility vehicle through plains lush with green spring grasses and grazing sheep, south toward Deir al-Zour province for the official announcement last month of the defeat of ISIS’ so-called caliphate, Ahmed allowed herself a moment to muse about a lesson from history. In the year 612 BCE, she told me, the Guti, ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia whom Kurds sometimes identify as forebears, banded together with the Medes and other tribes to throw off their oppressor, the Assyrian King Zuhak.
“All agreed to light the torch of freedom on that day, March 21, the same day we declared the end of battle [against ISIS],” she said, recounting the legend of Nowroz, the Kurdish new year—a celebration of rebirth and renewal that has come to symbolize popular resistance. “At that time, there was a confederation of tribes, in the same way as today there is agreement between Kurds, Arabs, and Syrians over injustice, over oppression,” she went on. “The injustice of ISIS has been defeated by all the groups of this region. We have a confederal agreement. Same circumstances, different dates. Same geography, same results.”
Debbie Bookchin
A crowd of thousands celebrating Nowroz, the Kurdish New Year, in Kobane, Northern Syria, March 21, 2019
Confederation, said Ahmed, is vital to the stability of the Autonomous Administration (commonly known by the acronym NES). The region, which now encompasses one third of Syria and some 30 to 40 percent of its population, is also known more informally as Rojava, from the Kurdish word for West, referring to its location as the western-most part of greater Kurdistan, the ancestral homeland of the Kurds that includes parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. This entity dates from the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2012, when the Kurds began to implement what would become a new form of political organization based on self-governing, confederated communities. “The project,” as the Kurds sometimes refer to this region and its government, has pioneered a pluralistic, multi-ethnic political system—unique in the region—in which Arabs, Syriacs, Turkmens, Kurds, and other ethnic groups share all positions of power and govern their communities autonomously while participating in a broader democratic network. They view their model as the only hope for lasting peace and stability, and seek to work with Damascus to achieve recognition for the NES within a federated Syria.
As I traveled through the region, members of minority communities told me that, for the first time in decades, they were truly collaborating instead of being pitted against each other by the divide-and-rule policies of the dynastic Assad regimes. The Rojava project is based on a vision of economic, political, cultural, gender, and educational equality that they hope will transform Syrian society. Women’s rights, ecological awareness, and grassroots democracy are the three main pillars on which their “social contract” rests. Despite these convictions, NES leaders say that they don’t have the resources to stem a resurgence of ISIS without outside help. Unless the Coalition partners that formed to defeat ISIS including the US, Britain, and other leading nations provide the military, financial, and, above all, diplomatic support necessary to ensure political stability, the Islamic State movement will return in the region and from here, will export its terrorism to the West.
“If the political problems of Syria are not solved now, then Daesh will come back stronger than ever before,” said Sherwan Darwish, a spokesman for the Manbij Military Council, using the Arabic term for ISIS. “The future is even more dangerous than right now.” The MMC, as it is known, is the military force that began protecting the Manbij region after its liberation from ISIS in August 2016, when Turkey insisted that the Kurdish forces withdraw from the region. Manbij is one of seven cantons that make up the NES. The other six are Afrin, Jazeera (sometimes given as Cizre), Raqqa, Tabqa, Deir al-Zour, and Euphrates, which includes the border town of Kobane. Among the challenges facing Ahmed and her colleagues is that despite holding this large land mass, the NES has no internationally recognized status, hence her busy diplomacy these past months.
Her mission is set against a complicated geopolitical contest for control and influence over Syria, particularly between the Damascus-based regime of Bashar al-Assad and Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. NES officials have their own list of security concerns that apply to their territory: the establishment of ISIS sleeper cells, the continuing spread of jihadist ideology, economic instability, and the need for a legal process and repatriation for imprisoned foreign fighters for ISIS. On top of that, there are daunting humanitarian challenges: the tens of thousands of internally displaced persons living in refugee camps, vast infrastructure needs, and a program of rehabilitation for Syrians who aided ISIS or adapted to its rule in towns that were occupied by the Islamic State before the Syrian Democratic Forces, the US-backed militia of Kurds, Arabs, and Syriacs, fought to reclaim the region.
Neighboring Iraq has become an object lesson in how territorial reconquest can provide a false sense of security. Since “victory” was declared in December 2017, ISIS sleeper cells have launched hundreds of attacks: assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings—some in towns and districts never held by the group. And already, a sleeper cell killed seven Kurdish soldiers at a Manbij checkpoint just days after the official defeat of ISIS in Syria.
Although they face a similar threat of jihadist terrorism and guerrilla tactics, Rojava’s leaders believe their region could become a model for stability in the Middle East—if they can get outside support. Iraq’s centralized government has implemented anti-terror laws that have undermined the capacity of local communities to deal with lesser infractions and has empowered sectarian militias that have aggravated civilian populations with their heavy-handed counter-terrorism operations. In contrast, in Rojava, such communities are encouraged to resolve local matters themselves, using a model they have found successful in which “women’s houses,” started by the influential women’s organization Kongra Star, sort out domestic, family, and economic disputes in communities across the region. This process, more akin to arbitration, prevents tens of thousands of legal proceedings every year. And officials here say that they aim to reintegrate Syrians who cooperated with ISIS, rather than warehouse them in prisons.
Many of the roots—such as tribal chauvinism, religious fundamentalism, economic inequality—that fed the growth of ISIS in Iraq and parts of Syria outside of the NES region, are largely absent in Rojava, officials argue. But to ensure that those elements don’t surface, Ahmed said, “We need an organized campaign against the cult of ISIS. This will require personnel, financial and material support.” First of all, she said, the Coalition should use its influence in Iraq to end that country’s embargo that has starved the NES region of the equipment it needs to supply industrial needs—mills to process the abundant wheat that farmers grow across Jazeera’s red clay plains, for example, or machinery to refine oil from the region’s wells. From asphalt to medical products, everything is in short supply. Even basic items like desks for schools are hard to come by because of their cost, though education is crucial in ridding people of what leaders here call the “ISIS mentality.”
The US and European countries could also use their diplomatic influence with Turkey to end its military aggression that threatens the region’s sovereignty and security. At the same time, Ahmed said, the NES seeks to remain part of Syria, but wants Damascus to acknowledge its autonomy in a new Constitution. In an effort to appease Turkey, the US maintains that its relationship with the SDF alliance of Kurdish, Arab, and Syrian militias, led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), has been purely “transactional.” But this five-year collaboration has had huge military significance for Western security interests in the region.
Since the battle of Kobane in 2014, the Kurds have relied on US and Coalition air support to beat back ISIS and stave off other hostile actors. At a cost of 11,000 lives and thousands more wounded, the SDF pushed ISIS first from Kobane, and then from town after town, across northern Syria. It’s time for the Western powers of the Coalition to repay their debt to their SDF allies in the fight against ISIS by recognizing the NES diplomatically.
Fawza Youssef, another senior NES leader, was even more blunt than Ahmed. NATO powers should admit that Turkey “has become a dangerous source of instability in the region by sponsoring terrorism,” she told me, pointing to the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army militias that had recruited fighters from jihadist groups and overran the NES canton of Afrin a year ago. Besides terrorizing the local civilian population with kidnappings, rapes, torture, ransoms, and the bombing of important infrastructure like a water treatment plant, this Turkish-sponsored incursion forced as many as 350,000 people, mostly Kurds, to flee of which 170,000 are now living in outdoor refugee camps. Turkey’s claim that it was combating the threat of terrorism along its border is vigorously disputed by the NES, which says its forces have never fired a hostile shot in Turkey’s direction and that Turkey has been the aggressor. They have described the district’s resettlement by Free Syrian Army families as forced demographic change, essentially ethnic cleansing, a charge that has been backed by independent groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Meanwhile, it was the SDF that liberated the ISIS “capital” of Raqqa in October 2017, finally cornering the last zealots on the eastern border of Syria in the small town of Baghouz in January this year. The victory in Baghouz last month came after jihadist holdouts and their families—some 10,000 people in all—streamed out of the town over a period of weeks. There were long delays as the SDF tried to manage the process of disarming and imprisoning the fighters, and sending the women and children to the al-Hawl refugee camp, which now holds more than 72,000 people.
The fate of these ISIS fighters and their families is another grave challenge facing the NES. No one can account for exactly how many of the Burka-covered women are citizens of other countries, but Nuri Mahmoud, a YPG spokesman, said the number was high even before the fall of Baghouz. Grabbing a sheet of paper from a drawer in his desk, he pointed to a prior count of 584 foreign jihadist women and 1,248 children in camps, while the tally of foreign fighters in SDF-controlled prisons was already 795, from forty-six different countries. Those numbers don’t include an estimated 20,000 Iraqis who had joined the Islamic State and are now being interned in NES, or the thousands of ISIS holdouts, mostly foreign fighters, who emerged from Baghouz. Given the camp conditions, all these jihadists and their wives, now numbering many thousands, pose a severe security risk—not just locally but for the world, NES officials said, especially in light of Turkey’s threats to invade other parts of the NES region.
Coalition countries have so far refused to accept the repatriation of their foreign fighters, and NES officials have largely given up pressing them on the issue. Instead, they argue, the fighters should be tried by an international tribunal in Rojava. In that way, the world can bear witness to their crimes and see their extremist ideology exposed. But a judicial process of this order will require resources and funds the NES does not have.
“The mentality of Daesh would get an international audience,” Mahoud said. “Sunni Arabs, who now believe it represents Islam, would see the difference between Daesh and real Sunni Islam.” An international tribunal would also show that the Coalition and its partners had observed international human rights conventions, NES leaders point out, which would give legitimacy to the adjudication and imprisonment of ISIS fighters.
While NES officials were pleased when President Trump walked back his decision to withdraw all US troops from the region, now agreeing to leave a force of about 400, they want to see Washington use its clout to press for a negotiated peace in Syria—one that gives the Kurds and other ethnicities from the NES region a seat at the negotiating table.
“The US always says the decision is up to the Syrians, but we know very well that it’s not like that,” Ahmed said. “So they should have a vision for Syria and they should be transparent about their vision regarding Syria and also the political project being implemented here.” In Rojava, American military might already helped strengthen a society in which “people were taking care of their own affairs,” added Mahmoud. “This is something that never happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
A YPG commander named Polat Can, who dropped by Mahmoud’s office at that moment, chimed in: “We have to build a future together. It’s all the world’s job and mission—especially your country’s.”
Debbie Bookchin
Girls playing in the garden of the Museum of Martyrs in Kobane, the town where some 1,400 mainly Kurdish men and women died fighting ISIS in 2014 and 2015, Northern Syria, March 21, 2019
The revolution in Rojava — founded on principles of anticapitalism, Kurdish self-determination, and women's liberation — is at risk of being wiped out. And the Trump administration may just turn its back.
In northeastern Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are spearheading a final military campaign against the Islamic State — attempting to defeat the organization once and for all. Their effort is part of Operation Roundup, a military mission backed by the United States.
According to US officials, the Syrian Democratic Forces have cleared the Baghuz and Dashisha areas in eastern Syria and are now conducting a final push into the Middle Euphrates River Valley. “Victory by the Syrian Democratic Forces there,” US colonel Sean Ryan announced in a September 18 press briefing, “will mean that ISIS no longer holds territory.”
The Syrian Kurdish fighters that form the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces are well-known on the international left. Over the last several years, they’ve led a remarkable socialrevolution in Rojava, the northern part of Syria, where they are seeking to establish an autonomous, anticapitalist territory that secures Kurdish self-determination while overturning gender-based hierarchies.
The revolutionary goals of the Syrian Kurds make them unlikely partnersfor the United States. Although US officials have repeatedly praised the SDF as the most effective anti-ISIS fighters in Syria, Washington has made no secret of its opposition to the revolution in Rojava.
Earlier this year, US officials gave Turkey the green light to invade and conquer Afrin, one of Rojava’s three cantons. More recently, the US has been pressuring Kurdish military leaders to leave Manbij, an area that the SDF liberated from the Islamic State in 2016.
It’s unclear what President Trump thinks about all of this. He recently praised the Kurds as “great fighters” and “great, great people,” but he previously expressed little concern about their fate. The values that Trump personifies — American capitalism, plutocratic governance, anti-feminist reaction — are sharply at odds with those of the Rojava revolution.
Mattis resigns after clash with Trump over troop withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan
President Trump announced Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would step down in February. Mattis joined the administration early in Trump's presidency. (Video: Sarah Parnass /Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned Thursday after clashing with President Trump over the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, saying in a parting letter that the president deserves someone atop the Pentagon “better aligned” with his views.
The retired Marine general’s surprise resignation came a day after Trump shocked American allies and overruled his advisers, including Mattis, upon announcing a withdrawal from Syria. In the process, Trump declared victory over the Islamic State, even though the Pentagon and State Department for months have been saying the fight against the group in Syria isn’t over. Mattis resigns after clash with Trump over troop withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan - The Washington Post
If Hammond is serious about ‘fairness’, he should be questioning the monopolistic and undemocratic structures on which big tech profits are built rather than just asking for a small slice of them
In Silicon Valley people like to call what they do ‘disruption’. But when it comes to the economic, social, and political concentrations of power, they haven’t disrupted them but exaggerated them. Platform monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have taken advantage of ‘winner-takes-all’ network effects to gain unprecedented power and expand into more and more markets while regulatory frameworks scramble to catch up.
The percentage of tax paid by the big five tech companies has halved since 2013. The government is now, finally, addressing the ‘fairness’ of the mechanisms these firms use to avoid tax. The basic challenge policy-makers around the world face is how to ensure that the spoils of digital transformations in different sectors are more evenly distributed. The Chancellor’s ‘Digital Services Tax’ tries to answer this challenge - but it’s the wrong answer. The Digital Services Tax will take of 2% of the revenue generated from UK users of the tech giants operating in three areas: search engines, social media platforms and online marketplaces. The tax will only apply to profitable companies with global revenues of over £500million to ensure only large companies are taxed. The proposals are expected to raise £400million a year.
Following the announcement, critics immediately pointed out that £400million across all the firms is a negligible amount. Last year, the top five tech firms - Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Cisco - made an estimated revenue of £6.6billion from UK customers. Corporation taxation is based not on revenue (how much a company makes), but profits (how much a company makes, minus its costs), and the global tech giants have used this to ensure that they record most of that profit in jurisdictions that attract the least tax.
Hammond’s new policy seeks to apply tax to revenue rather than profit. Since revenue is accounted for in the country it is generated in, any effort by companies to cleverly minimise the tax they owe through complex internal pricing transfers and structures won’t work. However, given that the new tax isn’t set to be implemented until 2020, the same time that tech giants will start to enjoy a 2% cut in their corporation tax rate, the net receipts will not even reach the rather meek £400million set out in the Budget.
The real challenge for policy makers (that the Budget made no attempt to address) is how to build and nurture an alternative models of platforms that work for the needs of citizens, not private profit. The Digital Services Tax is basically a green light for the dominant profit-driven platforms to keep amassing vast power through questionable means that include: exploiting labour, undermining democracy, and hoarding data to build ‘black-boxed’ AI. If Hammond is serious about ‘fairness’, he should be questioning the monopolistic and undemocratic structures on which these profits are built rather than just asking for a small slice of them. If you came home from work and your housemate had killed your pet hamster and cooked it in a pie, you wouldn’t just ask him to save you some leftovers in a tupperware. You would ask why he killed the hamster.
The top five tech firms are together worth more than the huge international businesses that make up the entire FTSE 100. But their vast power is not just based on the amount of money they have. They are also now hoarding most of the world’s data, 90% of which didn’t exist a few years ago. This enables them to develop unrivalled AI-based services that will shape the future of society while the public sector become more and more dependent on them. As tech writer Wendy Liu argues, “the battle over digital platforms… is a battle over technological development more broadly and who gets to control and deploy that.” The Digital Services Tax demonstrates a total misunderstanding of the nature of the threat the tech giants pose - one that goes far beyond tax avoidance.
Hammond claims that the UK will lead the way globally in holding the digital economy accountable. In fact, there are already global leaders in the fight to curb the power of tech giants with far more radical tactics than those proposed by the government. And they’re not national governments at all - they’re cities. There is significant potential for urban governments to regain control over technology, data and infrastructure, and therefore over the services they mediate. The cities of New York and Moscow have rewritten their contracts with tech firms to demand access to data and algorithmic transparency. In Barcelona and Amsterdam, authorities are working with communities to ensure that platforms serve people and that data is used to develop tools and services with clear public benefit, for example using pollution sensors to highlight difficult areas, or developing an ethical alternative to AirBnb. These services based on the logic of solidarity, social cooperation and collective rights.
Cities alone cannot tackle the threat that monopolistic tech firms pose to society, and Hammond is right that this will ultimately require global coordination. But governments can look to the radical strategies of these local governments as a blueprint for transforming how value is produced and distributed in the digital economy.
We met Ben Legg, the man behind Ola in Exeter and who was previously Chief Operating Officer for Google in Europe.
Hannah Finch 11 NOV 2018
Global taxi-hailing giant Ola is set to launch in Exeter thanks to the city’s boom time reputation.
Exeter’s explosion in student numbers, its vibrant economy and well paid workers means it is a perfect launch pad for the Uber rival that currently conducts one billion rides a year around the world, with more than a million drivers and 125 million customers in over 110 cities.
And if goes well, there are plans to roll out in fifteen of the biggest towns and cities across the South West, including Plymouth and Torquay.
Ola managing director Ben Legg, said: “Exeter is really up and coming, people here are used to new technology and we like students because they tend to adopt tech early, we think it will work really well.”
Ola launched in India in 2010 and was developed by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd. The business has a lion share of the market in India and was said to be worth around $3 billion in 2017.
It has been on a major expansion programme in Australia and New Zealand and has taken its first steps into the UK market with launches in Cardiff and Newport in South Wales. Now, Ola is launching in Exeter, Bristol and Bath after obtaining licenses to operate in the university cities.
Mr Legg is leading the UK operation. He is a former Army captain, Chief Operating Officer for Google in Europe and a sales and marketing specialist for Coca Cola, leading a team of 12,000 in India.
He said that Ola is looking to expand into towns and cities that are considered too small by Uber and it will also offer a choice of a private hire vehicle or metered taxis.
Uber has been criticised in recent years and has been granted an operating license for a 15-month probation period after concerns were raised about public safety and security. Concern has also been raised about drivers’ rights in the so-called gig economy.
Mr Legg said: “We like to think we’re a little but nicer than Uber, we wait until we have a license to operate before we start and while Uber typically takes 25-30% of the fare from drivers, we take between 5% and 15%.”
Users can hail a ride by using the Ola app that handles everything from payment to sharing journey information with family and friends. It also has an emergency button that goes straight through to a call centre.
Mr Legg: “That is as much about our drivers’ safety from drunk or aggressive passengers as it is about reassuring our passengers that they can get help at any time.”
Ola has been on the look out for drivers in the city and hopes that the platform will begin to build a bigger presence over time.
Mr Legg said he believes the platform is a key part of the future of transport, where wide scale use of electric cars will be common place in the next five to ten years.
He said: “We are heading into a future where most people won’t own a car and will start to consider cars as a service rather than something they own. “We expect that the average family will save around £5,000 to £10,000 a year. It makes far more sense in big cities that you hail a car when you need it.
