I am a gig worker.
Uber has given $280,000 and Doordash has given $240,000 to efforts to defeat Question D on the Portland ballot, which would raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour for all workers, including drivers for ride-hailing, taxi and delivery services. Greg Kearney/Portland Press Herald
Most weekends I deliver with Doordash in Portland, but I do not make enough to afford to live in the city.
My partner, who works as a medical assistant, makes enough to live in Portland only because she has an eccentric landlord who keeps her rent low. Questions B, C and D would do a lot to make Portland a livable city for us, but for me, Question D above all would give stability in my income and finally grant me a living wage – something that 20,000 workers in Portland are currently being denied. Why exactly am I seeing the claim, made time and again, that tipped workers are against Question D?
When I speak with other working-class people about Question D, I have only ever gotten two responses: Either they are for it, or they say their boss threatened their job about it. Indeed, it seems to me that the workers wheeled out in corporate news conferences to bash Question D are lobbyists first and service industry workers second. For their efforts, my bosses at Doordash have given them about $240,000, and Uber has given them another $280,000.
Peeling back the “progressive YIMBY” aesthetic that anti-Question D lobbyists have adopted reveals the class war being waged by gentrifiers in Portland against the city’s workers. Financial filings for political action committees like Enough is Enough and Restaurant Industry United feature real estate developers, Chamber of Commerce bosses and, of course, D.C.-based groups.
These lobbyists and the bosses who fund them have threatened Portland workers’ jobs and tried to throw mud at the regular working people who are members of Maine Democratic Socialists of America. They claim that DSA is behind gentrification somehow, but DSA is a membership organization that any working person committed to their own liberation can join. Unlike these PACs, DSA’s money comes from member dues, but if you follow the money, the reason lobbyists are making those claims becomes clear. The big money out-of-state donations that fund the campaign against B, C and D are certainly flashy, but the real bread and butter of their funding comes from local gentrifiers who are the people actually raising your rents.
The PAC filings list property LLC after property LLC, from the folks gentrifying Bayside, to the folks gentrifying Munjoy Hill, to the folks who have already gentrified the waterfront and are looking hungrily at Peaks. Stand up for yourselves, my fellow workers of Portland. Once the poorest of us are pushed out of the city, the gentrifiers will push out the next poorest. Do not wait for your turn at the chopping block. Break that cycle now by voting “yes” on B, C and D on or before Nov. 8.
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