713: Made to Be Broken
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A quick warning; there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole, sitting in for Ira Glass. And our show today is about rules and when it might be okay to break them, when it's even right to break them. About a year ago, summer 2019, my friend Benjamin Walker was in Nairobi, in Kenya, working on this project with some folks from the London School of Economics. And about four days into his trip, he found himself downtown, idly walking past this big huge recreation area called Uhuru Park. And boom! There was the protesters. How many of them were there? There's like 300 people here, just a mass of people, like men. And the thing they were protesting was Uber. They were Uber drivers on strike. Like I said, 2019. You might remember that there were a lot of Uber strikes all over the world around this time. Uber had been in Kenya for about four years, and these drivers had the same complaint that's followed the company wherever it's gone. Uber makes too much off the rides, they make too little. They wanted more of the pie, and they were mad. Benjamin waited into the crowd of strikers with a microphone because that's what he does. He hosts a podcast you might have heard of called Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. And this story was right up his alley. He's done lots of stories about the gig economy and its discontent. This one driver, Jafar, said one thing that would get them more money is rules. More rules. It is just about regulations number one, number two regulations, number three regulations. We need regulations from the government. Sometimes when you are regulated, you cannot come over here, make money, go to New York Stock Exchange, flow to your flow to your wherever, IPO and invest a billion years, come and take. And when we have regulations, we will never see a driver working 18 hours a day. Are we together? How do you win? That's what I want to know. How do you win? Solidarity. That was another driver there. Solidarity means everyone participating in the work stoppage. Except, from what Benjamin saw that week, there were plenty of other Uber drivers still out working. In fact, even as they were all standing there, 300 strong protesting against Uber. So there is like a road that goes through this part of the park and some guy Uber driver decided to go through the protest. And they know he is an Uber driver how he has like the little Uber sign in his window or something. Yep, yep, yep.
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