The Future of Work, Gig Economy Lawsuits, and Who Tech Really Builds For with Jarah Euston and David Chiu

[00:06.7] Hi, and welcome to the She+ Geeks Out podcast where we geek out about workplace inclusion and talk with brilliant humans doing great work making the world a better and brighter place. I'm Rachel. And I'm Felicia. Okay, so this episode's a little different than our usual format, and that's because the conversation took us somewhere we weren't expecting.

[00:24.8] We sat down with Jarah Houston, co founder and CEO of WorkWhile, which is a fast growing app based staffing platform that connects our hourly workers with flexible shifts. Jarah has a really compelling personal story. She grew up in Fresno working retail and is now building technology for the 80 million Americans working in frontline jobs.

[00:42.9] We talked about flexibility, the future of work AI and what it means to build tech for workers instead of just for other tech people. We also talked about one lawsuit that they settled with the city of San Francisco, and that conversation was interesting. Yeah. And here's where things get a little different.

[00:58.5] So after that conversation wrapped, we discovered that WorkWhile had recently settled a second, even bigger lawsuit with the San Francisco City Attorney's office for misclassifying workers as independent contractors instead of employees. So we reached out to David Chu, the San Francisco City Attorney, to hear his side of the story.

[01:18.5] And, you know, to be honest, his framing was a bit different. So what you're about to hear is actually both interviews back to back, which is, I think, a first for us, honestly. So first we're going to hear from Jar's perspective on building a platform for worker flexibility. Then we're going to hear David's perspective on what happens when flexibility becomes a cover for avoiding worker protections.

[01:39.6] And, you know, fair warning gets a little spicy. So just stay tuned. Follow on. We know this is a little longer than usual, but we hope that you enjoy. Yes. And there's a lot happening. So we're not going to share our usual thoughts on everything happening in the world. We're going to actually do a separate follow up for that.

[01:55.0] So keep an eye out for that. But let's get into it with Jara. Let's go. Okay. Our guest today is the lovely, Jara Houston, co founder and CEO at Work While. Hello and welcome. Jara, we are so excited to have you here. Hi.

[02:10.4] Thank you so much for having me. Yay. So let's just dive right in and get to the good stuff. We typically like to ask what your origin story is, but I'm going to give a little bit of context first because it's. I did a little bit of digging, and so I want to Do a little bit of context setting.

[02:25.8] So you grew up in Fresno, California, a city you described as being heavily dependent on hourly work and having one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country. Your first job was at party city at 16, blowing up helium balloons and doing what you called the worst job there, Go backs, which I had never heard of before, where you basically take shopping carts full of tchotchkes that people didn't actually want to buy and put them back on the floor.

[02:52.9] And so obviously in reading this, you know, this influenced the work that you do today. Would love to just hear, you know, when did you first recognize that the issue that, that you're grappling with, that we'll get into, didn't just lie with individual employers, but that the system itself really was fundamentally broken for hourly workers?

[03:10.6] And I would just love to get into what WorkWhile does to address this. Well, thank you so much for the research. And yes, you told no lies. All of those things are true. And you probably never worked retail. If you don't know about. Go back.

[03:26.0] So you got it. Yeah. I also have never worked retail, so this was new to me too. So, okay, let me paint the picture. Imagine that you're a mom with like three kids and a shopping cart full of stuff for a upcoming children's birthday party.

[03:44.6] And you get to the register and you start putting everything on the counter for it to get scanned and rung up. And you decide, you know, maybe I don't need that or that or that or that or that or that or all of these things. Right? And you're like, you know, actually, I'm not going to get that.

[04:00.4] How much is that? No, no, thank you. Well, the cashier has to like put that in a basket behind the register and every so often some other employee needs to go put it back on the retail floor. And you know, every single Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle party favor, streamer, balloon, napkin, cake, plate, dinner plate.

[04:24.0] Yeah, all of the things gotta go back. And so I found that to be the worst job to be assigned because it was like a maze of I don't know where all of these skus are. I also found being the cash register pretty stressful because it's like those kids don't want to be in line. And so you got to move fast.

[04:40.9] You know, it's a really high intensity job. And now I have a relaxing job of a, startup founder, CEO. Just so relaxing. So relaxing. You asked the question of when did I realize this was a problem? I mean, I think I knew it was a problem even as a teenager because, you know, growing up in Fresno, Fresno's the largest agricultural county in the United States.

[05:04.5] If you eat an almond or a raisin or a, tree fruit, it's probably grown in Fresno County. And if you don't work in ag or you're not a service professional, like a doctor, lawyer, a teacher, police officer, those types of jobs, there's really not a whole lot of other industry in Fresno.

[05:25.6] And so a lot of people who live there work hourly jobs. And it was true of, you know, my friends growing up, parents. It's true of my family. There are a lot of people who are working these types of jobs as their career track, including, you know, when I was in high school, my managers at Party City were in their 40s, right?

[05:48.1] And this was what they were doing. And it's, at least back in those times you could afford to live and have a life working an hourly job. And so a lot of people did it. You know, prices have increased.

[06:03.3] Bay Area refugees have descended on the Central Valley with cheaper real estate. So prices are going up and it's getting harder and harder to actually have a house and make a living working these jobs. But when I was growing up, that wasn't the case. So it was very normal, but the schedules were inflexible.

[06:20.7] There was little support for you as an employee, as a worker. And so, you know, I decided pretty early on I didn't want to retire from Party City and was lucky enough to go off to college and have a long and productive career in technology.

[06:39.2] And I got to a point in my tech career where, where I got a little burnt out of building software for other tech people. And so I think an important facet that a lot of folks who are not in the startup universe don't recognize is that founders and entrepreneurs generally are trying to solve their own problems.

[06:58.4] And so what that means for tech, the people who are solving tech problems are generally tech people. That's why there's so much technology built for technologists, because they see a problem and they build to solve it. A lot of technologists are not hourly workers and are not thinking, I want to build to solve that problem.

[07:18.1] But for me, after working at, startups, after working at big companies like the product VP at Yahoo back in the day and saw how all of that happened, working for a, data operations platform. I love analytics, I love data, but I didn't want to build anymore for data scientists per se.

[07:39.2] They have a lot of software. I am not uniquely put on this planet to build a better data pipeline. Some people are, and they're out there building them. I think that I'm uniquely here to be a voice for the people that I grew up with, for the 80 million Americans, more than half of the US labor force, who work frontline jobs and translate technology in a way that can help them.

[08:06.7] And, you know, being someone who's been a student of markets since college, I really think there's a lot we can do to help blow up the way frontline work happens today to reinvent this notion of employment, even to be more flexible and more in service to the worker.

[08:26.6] Excellent. Well, you have been pretty intentional, from what I have researched and read about saying that WorkWhile's not necessarily a gate platform. And so you're not really subscribing to this idea that workers want, you know, quote, unquote, infinite flexibility. What they want and need is flexible schedules.

[08:43.3] But that infinite flexibility idea in and of itself is a kind of a fallacy that's maybe created by people who've never had to do these kind of hourly jobs or never had to pay rent on hourly wages. And, you know, I think this is a pretty pointed critique of, what I think tends to be more of, like a dominant narrative around flexible.

[09:00.6] So why do you think that narrative's been so persistent? And what does it cost workers when we're designing a system or, like, working environments around the fantasy of who they are, what they need, what they want, rather than the reality of the lives that they're living? I think that we have been very intentional in not using the word gig when we describe anything related to the WorkWhile marketplace.

[09:24.6] And I strongly prefer the idea and the term flexibility. So thinking about more flex work, flexible work, I think the future for every industry is more flexibility and more flexible work. But specifically, I think gig came into our lexicon through Uber.

[09:42.2] And Uber is an amazing company and has been insanely disruptive and a huge success story from a marketplace that has labor in it. But from, you know, its beginnings, they were rocky. And. And the term gig has been negatively associated with the bad things that can happen on certain platforms.

[10:04.0] And we at WorkWire really intentionally want to take all of the good that came from the Uber rideshare experience, but really look at a marketplace through the lens of what's going to serve the worker first.

[10:20.5] And so at work, wild we are worker first. That is in our DNA. That is our core value. And anyone who works here will tell you that's what we talk about every day, all the time. How can we best serve the worker? And I think the challenge with the term gig because it's, it's associated with some negative, things that happened in the early days of rideshare.

[10:42.5] It makes businesses think that people who are working gig jobs are somehow less than and that is the biggest misconception. Or that they're fly by night or oh, it's day labor, it's low quality. I have heard some shocking ways that businesses describe our workers on the platform.

[11:02.9] Until they get to know them and they see that the skills and the reliability and the work ethic, they're just putting it in a bucket of something that is less than. And what we find is that just because you want some flexibility in your work schedule doesn't mean that you have any less aptitude or quality for work than someone who's working if full time job with a one to one employee employer relationship.

[11:29.8] In fact, on our platform about 40% of the workers are working 36 hours a week or more with us, which means they're not there just to pick up eight hours here, four hours there. They want to craft their own full time equivalent work week, but they want to do it in a way where they can take their kid to the doctor or they can go take that class they need or whatever it is, right?

[11:55.4] Like there's a million things happening for every person. There is a unique set of circumstances. It's kind of like for people who aren't as familiar with the space, it's kind of like asking what do hourly workers want? It's kind of like asking what do women want? Right? There's 80 million people who work these types of jobs.

[12:12.0] They want 80 million different things. Everyone's family is unique, everyone's care profile is unique. And so there's a lot of reasons why people need that flexibility. But it doesn't mean that folks are not reliable. They and in fact what we've been able to do at WorkWhile is use a lot of technology, AI, machine learning and data science to be able to Predict with about 96% accuracy who's going to be reliable.

[12:36.4] And by that I mean who's literally going to show up and complete their eight hour shift. We can know that because of all the signals that we get. And once businesses start to understand that, they become very excited because the challenge with hourly work is not just for workers.

[12:51.6] And I would argue the challenge of traditional unemployment in general. It's got to evolve, right? Like if you think about 20 years ago, forget about 50 or 100 years ago, we didn't have an iPhone or a smartphone in anybody's pocket.

[13:06.7] Right. IPhone came out in 2007. App Store launched in 2008. And before that, people did not have computers in their pocket computers that could track your location. That's a really critical advance. We also didn't have LLMs. We didn't have LLMs three years ago.

[13:22.1] You couldn't do a screening, you couldn't do an automated agentic interview. There's so much new that is possible, possible now, but if you think about 20, 30 years ago, it wasn't possible to even imagine that you could have one person picking up shifts and working for different businesses during the work week.

[13:39.0] That was too much paperwork. Who could process that? Would the worker have like a dossier with papers that they brought to each business? No, that would be crazy. It would just not feasible. But now with technology, with having a computer in your pocket at all times, it's really blowing up this notion that it has to be one worker to one business.

[14:00.6] And it's not good for businesses to have that relationship either, because what's the likelihood that all of your best workers want to work this schedule? You want them to work. It's zero. Right? And so you get call outs, you get no shows, you get attrition. Hourly work has a really high quits rate.

[14:17.1] People leave those jobs all the time because they're not flexible. If you allow that flexibility, people will keep coming back. And in fact, we have a 95% worker repeat rate. That means people keep going back to the same businesses because they like it. Humans are creatures of habit.

[14:32.9] Everybody wants to work at a place that they know that they like the manager, they know how the job's done. It's just, it's kind of counterintuitive that we have this preconceived notion that folks who want to work flexibly don't want all those things they do, but they want to have the personal autonomy to decide when they work.

[14:51.7] You know, it's so funny because as you're sharing this, it made me think about temp agencies. So I remember when I was, I think, just out of college, and I was like, let me get on some temp agencies because, you know, I need to. Right. Figure that out.

[15:06.8] And I'm thinking so much about this concept of the flexible workforce and who that actually is, and you're specifically like. So I was doing. I remember back in the day, I was. I loved it. I was. I know Felicia also loves. This is like, give us a spreadsheet all day.

[15:23.8] Long give that such a joy, you know. But the specific kind of work you're talking about with Frontline, there might be something a little bit different. So can you just talk a little bit about that? And in, you know, 2025, 2026, like the new norm feels like, yeah, absolutely.

[15:39.8] I think it's a new norm for almost every profession. Right. Like the pandemic really blew the doors off. Right? Like, that's when a lot of power went back into the hands of the worker to say, oh, no, I'm not going to that job at that poorly ventilated facility in the middle of COVID No, thank you.

[15:57.5] Right. And that's when we started having this narrative of like, oh, nobody wants to work anymore. Unemployment so high. Nobody. Nobody wants a job. And it's like, well, what are you offering? It's a market. If supply and demand are not matching, that's because the price is wrong. Maybe you're not offering a market clearing rate for those workers.

[16:15.7] Maybe they can get paid more elsewhere. And I'm sorry, they don't want to work at your restaurant that pays minimum wage and you know, is not flexible and has other. Has a grumpy manager, whatever it is. Right. And so we really view this flex as the future of all work and for the front line.

[16:33.0] The specific challenges that I think we're addressing with AI and technology is really around skills. And so there's a big trend around skills based assessment. Not necessarily related to your work history or where you worked before. Not that it's irrelevant, but the reason why we cared so much about your resume was because that gave us some signal into your skill.

[16:57.1] Right. It was a proxy. But now with agentic AI, we actually have a voice agent that can talk to a potential worker and probe deeply on. You said you were a barista.

[17:12.7] Well, how do you make a cappuccino? How do you pull an espresso shot? How long does it take to do xyz? All the things that you should know if you have this skill. And we can have a lot more confidence that someone has the skills that they need in order to work a specific shift.

[17:29.2] And so we cut down on all of the phone interview, in person interview. The idea that some people are still trying to do in person interviews for these types of jobs is just crazy. It's so inefficient. And the technology, I strongly believe, has less bias than the individual human.

[17:48.9] Our workers like to do the voice agent assessment because they could do it 24 7. They can do it while they're waiting to pick up their kid. They can do it late at night. And the agent is never having a bad day. The agent is always friendly and nice and polite.

[18:05.9] The agent is not from a different ethnic group that doesn't like your ethnic group. Like, these types of interpersonal dynamics make a lot of frontline work challenging. There's a lack of respect and a lot of frontline establishments. And so we're so excited about the possibilities now where we can screen in depth and catalog the skills that every unique individual has to make sure we're supporting them and offering them the best opportunities.

[18:31.7] Well, it's interesting because I want to just kind of, for anyone who's listening, who's like, this is the first time I'm ever hearing about work wild, like what is happening, just to kind of drill down a little bit. So I'm just looking right now at your site. And so some of the industries that you support are warehouse staff, manufacturing, event staff, facilities, food service staff, retail, obviously.

[18:53.5] So all of these, I think, fit in really well with what you've been talking about so far in the sense that these are not necessarily, you know, you don't need to go to an office and put in a 9 to 5 or anything like that. And you talked about how AI can be used for these kind of use cases. And I think that what we've been sort of looking at and hearing and listening, especially in the last year or so, has been this fear and his anxiety around AI replacing employment and people are getting laid off and AI is taking over.

[19:22.0] Right. And so I think there was this generalized anxiety, especially because it's happened so quickly to your earlier point that AI is going to just replace humans altogether. And what you've been starting to talk a little bit about is not a replacement, but sort of an enhancement, if you will.

[19:37.3] Right. And so you talked for one case scenario around, I guess, having an AI agentic agent interview people to get a sense of are they equipped for the job. And it's interesting that you mentioned that because I have done a little bit of event and food service work in my day.

[19:53.4] And I've often thought to myself, you know, you can tell really quickly if someone's really good at their job, even if it's literally the first hour that they're on a job, like in food service, for example, like, you know, when someone's really good at what they're doing and they know what they are all about. But it's so hard to your point to like encapsulate that on a resume or Even just a listing of where you've worked, because someone might have, like 20 different restaurants on their resume, but it doesn't tell you whether they're good or bad.

[20:19.7] So I am curious, like, beyond that kind of interviewing, I guess, if you will, like, how else are you using AI in terms of your platform and what WorkWhile is doing to either, I guess, serve the people who are using both businesses and individuals, and also, like, are there any guardrails or any philosophical.

[20:39.8] Philosophical commitments that you're thinking about as you're incorporating AI more and more into what you're doing on your end? Yeah, absolutely. We use AI in a lot of different places on the platform. Screening is just one of them. And one thing that we do is we use screening for data validation and collection.

[20:59.6] We don't use it for decision making. Right. We still have a human in the loop making final decisions, but that human can make much better decisions when they have a lot more data that's been validated through the agent. Right. So it just cuts down on all of that and we think is more accurate.

[21:15.5] Right. Because it doesn't bring any human bias to someone who might be doing an interview and didn't think to ask you this other question that would have illustrated that this person has all these other skills. Right. That they've done big banquets before, not just restaurants. Right. Like all of these things.

[21:31.7] And then the other thing that we do that I think is really unique to WorkWhile is we leverage a lot of machine learning and predictive modeling to match people to the right shifts. So we understand the full battery of someone's skill sets. And then we have all of the requested work on the platform, and then the algorithm is able to match the two in a way that serves both the business and the individual.

[21:55.4] And we're very, very conscious potential for bias to enter into the equation. And for that reason, really early on, we decided we're not going to collect demographic information. So we don't have that data that could go into the model. It's just not available.

[22:11.2] And so we think really hard about how to be responsible and how to do this in the right way, because again, the whole mission is to be worker first. We wouldn't want to collect data that could potentially be used to introduce bias into our models. And so we just don't do it.

[22:27.1] The other things that I think are really exciting around AI is the ability to help people learn new skills. So while we can understand what skills you have today with agentic AI, we can also upskill people in a Much more dynamic, easy to digest way.

[22:44.9] So imagine if you're a hourly worker, you could literally have a AI agent who acts as your job agent, like your job coach that says like hey, we have these other positions available, they pay a little bit more but I notice that you're missing this, this and this skill.

[23:03.8] Would you like to do a training so that you can get upskilled and you can unlock this other high paying job? No, that would never pencil out if you had to hire people to do that, be that kind of job coach, mentor for someone who's making $20 an hour.

[23:21.8] But with AI it extremely ROI positive to do things like that. And I think that's really exciting. Like, and you know, I firmly believe that my job is going to be replaced before every warehouse associates. I think the thinking, the reasoning, the strategic ability of the models that we have are improving so fast.

[23:44.8] It's going to take a lot longer for a humanoid robot to be able to go and pack every shape of goods that you might find in a distribution facility or in a manufacturing plant. And that's really never happened before. It's never been the case that the white collar is disrupted before the blue collar which I think it's a really interesting time that we have and it's great to see the AI deployed in service to those blue collar workers.

[24:14.8] That's so interesting and I, I think you're hitting on a point. Exactly. And I am curious just as a quick follow up question then. So like looking forward x amount of years when AI is you know, completely taken over, do you think that obviously human beings are still going to be around unless we enter into like a full terminator situation, but do you feel like that means that longer term or short term, whatever it might be, human or humans, people who are working are going to be more in these like service or I don't even want to call it service but like just I guess blue collar jobs, hands on jobs versus we've had such a dominance, a long standing dominance of white collar jobs for so long.

[24:51.4] So you see that flipping on its head then? I do, I really do because there's just been a lot of research including out of Stanford's digital economy lab that shows that the impact to new college grads and trying to get these white collar knowledge based entry level positions and a lot of them are being eliminated because the models can do that.

[25:12.5] The models can do what a new college grad can do on a computer. Right. And so I think we're going to see a lot more people Going into more hands on type of work, especially around the trades, the skilled trades where craftsmanship is going to matter.

[25:29.8] There's a whole philosophy that really what humans are going to be good at is curation and taste. Right? We're going to be able to have an opinion about the look and feel and the vibe of something that a LLM or an agent's not going to be able to have.

[25:45.4] I think they'll catch up eventually, but maybe there's a window where humans are really good at taste, but I think it's going to be interesting. Look, I don't think that white collar work is going to be eliminated in the next five years, but I think there's going to be so much more opportunity to in the physical, in something that requires the hands of a human that a lot of people who might have thought that I'm going to go into software engineering, maybe they go into something that's more around transmission lines or more around craftsmanship.

[26:15.4] Getting back to that, because that's going to be a lot longer before that gets disrupted by AI. I think Felicia needs to weigh in on something that she just backtailed with me that I thought was actually very interesting. He's like, I'm outed.

[26:30.8] Apologies for anyone who's listening, who's like, what? Yeah, no, we had our question list in the back end and we're always like, we already answered this question, whatever. So we're just doing a little bit back chatting. But I actually had a quick thought as you were just saying that, Jara, because I was like, I wonder what this means for people who are disabled who had been able to benefit so greatly from more like mind work, right?

[26:51.9] Where like perhaps you cannot do the physicality of certain jobs. And I am, you know, honestly, like, that's kind of scary for to be thinking about that if we're going to see a big shift to rely more heavily on the physicality of it. I just wonder what that means for disabled people.

[27:09.0] Yeah, I think it's a really interesting thing to think about and it's not my area of expertise, but I could also imagine some big unlocks that AI is going to have for disabled, for people who have disabilities, right? Of like being able to control and do more by voice, being able to have like computer vision telling you exactly what's going on at all times.

[27:30.1] Like there's a lot of things that are exciting, but I don't deny it's scary. Some people are going to be disrupted, right? There's creative destruction, there's going to be winners and there's going to be losers. And how we plan for that and how we build support and development and care for folks who are not going to be the beneficiaries of this tech advancement.

[27:54.0] I mean, that is a big challenge for society, whether it's business, whether it's government. I don't think that government doesn't have a great track record of, intervening in these types of situations, but it's something that we have to consider because there are going to be people who don't get to take advantage of this.

[28:13.2] Yeah. And the reality is there have always been people who are unable to work. And that has. And it has always been a struggle that. You know, it's interesting, the term that you use, the, the winners and losers, right? Like, you know, I think the hope is that maybe we don't have to live in that world of, of winners and losers in the future.

[28:31.4] But I'm in a different, headspace here in 2026 than I was a year ago. But we'll put a pin in that. And I'm curious, as we do think, about what the work world might look like 10, 15 years from now. What does good work actually really look like?

[28:48.2] What role do you think that technology is going to play in it to really make it as equitable as possible beyond sort of what we've already touched upon? Yeah. I think it's very interesting how we want to define what is good work. Right. And, you know, like, I think going back to this idea that there could be people who are, quote, unquote, you know, not the winners in this scenario, I just think back to, like, you know, the deindustrialization of America, right?

[29:13.6] Our transition that we move from building things, plants, steel mills, right, like building cars here, to services. It seems like we're swinging back. And I think a lot of the AI enables more efficiencies in the labor market to where it could become cost effective to build things here again.

[29:38.8] And I think that's incredibly exciting, right? Because if we have a more flexible way of working and businesses can scale labor costs up or down depending on what's happening in production, and we take out all the need of having high employee turnover and recruiting, it's like a hamster wheel of recruiting, right?

[29:58.0] The leaky funnel that's very inefficient and very expensive, if we just have one, like, elastic labor force that can go where the jobs need to be done, that could generate enough efficiency to make it profitable to manufacture here again.

[30:15.6] And I Think that's really exciting. And so I think there's a lot of opportunities that don't get kind of the headlines, but that are going to be very possible. I also think there's jobs that we haven't even considered that are coming online that we can't possibly even imagine today.

[30:32.5] Even, like, we. We work with robotics companies because guess what? They need people. Right? Like, they're doing different things, but the robots need people, too. So I think it's going to be an interesting next three to five years.

[30:48.2] Yeah, no, for sure. It's. Again, like, you've mentioned this earlier, but it's just. It's so wild how quickly it has all sort of come together. Because, I mean, both Rachel and I also worked in tech too, before starting this company. And I remember folks talking about machine learning and LLMs, like, forever, and then it's sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool.

[31:08.0] And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, my gosh, here it is, like, AI. And I was just thinking, as you were talking about again, like, I'm just gonna pull out more movie references, but like the Terminator or not the Terminator, Oh, my gosh, what was I gonna say? RoboCop, right? Where the whole situation where, like, the human melded with the robot.

[31:24.5] And obviously that was an extreme situation. And it's a movie, it's not real yet, but we just don't know where things will take us, especially because it's all been changing so quickly. And it's also funny because as you were chatting, I was thinking about. I'm based out on the east coast, and the small town that I live in was a historic factory town.

[31:45.3] And so we have all these old humongous factory buildings all over. And they'd been repurposed over the last couple decades to be like, you know, housing and artist spaces and, you know, mixed use and all that great stuff. Right? But there was this huge disruption when we lost all the factory work that brought people here and really built up the town.

[32:05.8] So I think we just are entering into such a disruptive. I mean, we're not entering. We're in it. We're in the disruption right now. And one thing that I want to get your take on a bit further is around when people are working, they're not just working to have, like, spending money and, like, whatever, but they're working because they need to pay bills and, you know, health insurance and support family and all that stuff, right?

[32:27.2] And so the way that our economy is structured right now basically means that if you don't have a W2, it's really hard for hourly workers to get into systems around like, you know, health care, retirement pay, time off. Right. And that's part of the issue around this discussion of flexibility.

[32:43.0] And so I'm wondering how you see that maybe playing out in the future. Like is it possible to have a world in whatever this future ends up looking like, where as we're shifting more back to hands on service work, physical work, maybe not the kind of, you know, you're not at the company for X amount of years, you're not doing the nine to five, is it possible to also still have like financial stability, have access to benefits or is that also going to be disrupted, do you think?

[33:11.2] Yeah, I think there's a lot to unpack there. And so I think that there's no reason why working flexibly across the businesses can't provide the same level of parks benefits support as a, traditional one to one job does today.

[33:28.8] There's no structural reason for that. I think the whole idea that we, that we have to have a job is because the way healthcare is structured in this, in this country. Right? Yes, agreed. And we are the unique snowflake in doing it this way.

[33:46.4] And even under this American structure of typically your health insurance is provided by your employer and there's tax incentives and reasons for that. I don't think that that obviates flexible work at all.

[34:02.2] For example, on the WorkWhile platform, you can work W two shifts and you qualify for health benefits. You qualify for all the things a W2 employee qualifies for. So there's nothing that is in conflict theoretically between W2 employment and that flexibility.

[34:21.9] It's up to the business, it's up to the employer to decide, I want to allow this. And we think that they should. We think that like having a pool of flexible W2 workers is the best scenario. Right? Because people are getting all of the access to affordable healthcare that they would get with a one to one job.

[34:41.7] But then they get that same scheduling autonomy. And I think the scheduling autonomy is key to having a quote unquote good job. You need to have that. Because if you think about it like the analogy I always use is having a platform where you get to opt into when and where you work for frontline workers.

[35:01.4] It's kind of akin to unlimited PTO in the tech world, right? Unlimited PTO makes you feel really great. But tactically no one is on PTO all of the time. Right. In fact, companies that have unlimited PTO tend to have Employees who take less vacation than if you have like set vacation number of days.

[35:20.8] Right? Same is true for flexibility. Like yes, the flexibility is there when you need it, but you don't need it 99% of the time. You need to work your 36 to 40 hours to pay your rent. That's not fluctuating. But having that ability to take a day when you need to provides so much confidence that you're going to be able to maintain your livelihood if you have to go take care of something.

[35:45.5] I can't, I, can't over explain or over emphasize the psychological value of having autonomy over your own time and effort that flex work gives to people. The other thing that I think is really critical to understand that is a bit of a legacy in our economy is how we pay workers.

[36:05.8] That is something that needs to be blown up and disrupted. I feel very strongly that what we're doing today, the Fortune 500, are basically financing their working capital off the back of an hourly wage earner. Right? You work an eight hour shift, you earn that money, that money is yours.

[36:24.5] But your employer gets to hold it for a week, two weeks, a month. They hold it for a month, they're making like three and a half percent on that and then they pay you. You don't get compensated for that loan you gave your employer. We think that's garbage. We think that technology exists today to pay people as soon as they clock out.

[36:44.3] And that's what we strive to do on our platform. Because when you pay people their cash for the money they already worked for, a lot of great things happen. Did you know that today for frontline workers, they're holding about $800 billion in unsecured debt.

[37:01.2] That translates into 16% of their paycheck is going to interest that could be going to food, that could be going to savings, that could be going to whatever they need for their lives to improve their kids life. We want to blow that up and we want to help workers get paid their money as quickly as possible.

[37:18.6] When you pay people their money after they've earned it without this delay, they don't have to go to a payday lender. They don't even have to use some of these, you know, new fintechs where it's like, oh, I'm going to access my paycheck a couple of days early. Well, if you do the math, you're paying somewhere between 60 to 300% annual interest.

[37:39.0] If you annualize it to get access to 100 bucks three days early, right? There's a Financial middleman there, that's making a lot of money on that. We think that that's garbage. We think that we need to blow that up and pay people what they have worked so hard for.

[37:56.4] And that would allow people to advance in their lives, save for homes, not fall into debt, which is a huge boon to the economy. And these businesses don't need that three and a half percent. Right. Some of them are probably not even keeping it in an interest bearing account.

[38:11.8] It's like an afterthought for them. But again, this is a legacy because 30 years it wasn't possible to pay somebody at Clack app. Right. Like 50 years ago, you're on paper checks. What are you talking about? I gotta mail this. That takes time. Like all of this stuff was built because that's what was possible in the analog economy.

[38:29.3] And we're very slow to adjusting things to what is possible in the digital economy when it benefits the worker. And so we think we can blow up the employment structure and we definitely can blow up how people get paid. Ooh, that is so juicy, Jara.

[38:45.2] And you're making me think again about like when I, when I worked at a temp agency and, and how the temp agency was responsible for my pay, for my health care and all of that. But Work Wild doesn't do that. Right. It's really, the responsibility of the business. Is that right? No, we will.

[39:01.0] So for the W2 employees on the platform, we are the employer of record. Okay. Yeah. And we are responsible for presenting opportunities to them and we're responsible for providing access to health care and all of those things that a W2 employee is entitled to.

[39:18.6] Okay, so that's great. So then you're actually meeting that need. Now for those employees that are W. So you have both W2s and 1099s. Is that how it works? That's right. We have 10, 99 types of work and we have W2 types of work. Right.

[39:34.0] And so I don't think that there's any, any reason why you can't do a lot of this stuff on a W2 basis. Will it be more expensive? Maybe. Is there more paperwork? Yeah, for sure. More liability? There's liability, but with AI, again, like having to go through your i9 authorization, your W4, all of that stuff, like now it's a lot easier because you have technology that can help people get through that sort of thing.

[40:05.7] Super, super interesting. Okay, I got a juicy question for you. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, so your vision is a labor Market where workers thrive and businesses succeed together, which I love. Big fan. At the same time, Work While we learn, has navigated a $1 million settlement related to worker classification in California.

[40:27.4] I would love to just dig into that and curious to know how you hold that tension between the worker first mission and the pressures of operating in a system in a legal, like, sort of what we talked about, illegal and regulatory environment that doesn't necessarily always align with that mission, as we literally just talked about.

[40:43.1] How do you think about accountability when you're trying to do something so different and operating within these constraints that we have in this special snowflake of a country that we're in? Yeah, well, it's one of the unique challenges of growing and building a business in San Francisco.

[40:59.8] Right. And so the lawsuit that you're mentioning is by the SF City attorney, who is an elected official by the voters in San Francisco city and county. And, you know, the challenge is, I think we have a regulatory environment and certainly a city attorney who has a different perspective on what workers want.

[41:20.7] And, you know, I'm not sure when the last time David Chu worked an hourly shift was. I haven't had an opportunity to ask him. And I think what we strive to do is do what our workers want. We talk to them every day.

[41:38.6] The great thing about frontline workers is they're not shy about offering their opinions, and we hear immediately if there's something going on that they don't like. For as much as we focus on AI, one area that we have not deployed, a lot of AI is in our support team.

[41:56.9] Our support chat, if it's more than just an FAQ situation, is handled by a real person. And, most of the people on the support team were workers on the platform, and that's how we came to know them. And so having deep empathy for the workers on our platform, I think, is reflected in how we manage any complaints that we have.

[42:19.8] And when we talk to workers, we ask them, do you Want to be 1099 or W2? Well, they'll say, Want to be 1099. I want more flexibility, and I don't want to work those types of jobs. And so our guiding light is always the worker. And our labor market is changing, regulations are changing quickly.

[42:38.1] They've flipped and flopped since the existence of this business where now we're in Trump, too. Right. And so I think it will be a constant evolution of how we approach regulations. And by the way, there's 50 states, and they're all different.

[42:55.8] They're all unique. Which makes building the platform that we're building hard. It is hard to build what we've built because there's so much nuance and there's so many differences. But I'm confident that with advances in technology, we can stay up to date on all of the compliance jurisdictions.

[43:19.3] And, you know, it goes down to the zip code, right? Like, you have to pay attention to a lot of things. And before that was really challenging with like paper and people with technology gets a little bit easier. But yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of companies that are thinking of leaving California because it is a hard place to do business.

[43:39.6] Are you thinking about leaving California? I'm a fifth generation Californian. I love my state. I love, California. I think the taxes that we have to pay here, it's onerous, it's hard. But then I look at the weather, I look at the beauty, I look at the people.

[43:59.1] And I'm committed to making California the best possible place to raise your family, to live your life, and to build a business. I think the challenges are temporary, but the people and the culture of California, there's no other place in the world like California.

[44:16.7] I am deeply committed to building here. That's nice to hear as a transplant from Massachusetts to San Diego. So I don't know that I would ever leave myself. And if it's okay, I would love to just follow up on that because I'm curious,

[44:34.0] what would some ideal policies look like in California? Do you think that would serve both the workers and the businesses? Honestly, I think we need fewer policies. I think that I believe strongly that every public elected official has good in their heart.

[44:53.6] No one is running for local office because they have like a, an evil master plan to really mess things up. I think everyone is doing it with the best possible intentions, but oftentimes we have legislators or regulators seeking to regulate things that they don't understand.

[45:12.2] I'll give you an example. There was a Senate bill that ultimately got revised, but at one point this bill made it illegal to try to predict human behavior with an algorithm. And an algorithm is an equation, right? So it was literally like you cannot have a, math equation that potentially has the purpose of predicting something.

[45:35.7] The law as written was not. You can't act on it, you can't make decisions based on it, automated decisions based on it. You just can't even have the equation. And to me, when you have like a bill that's in committee or whatever, that's basically making math illegal, that's missing the point.

[45:54.0] Right. Like I understand wanting to protect the little guy who doesn't understand AI and we don't want like agents out there that are biased, that are making bad decisions. Like there's some real dystopian, dystopian stuff that I think is a real risk. But net in general, I'm a big believer in letting private industry figure things out in partnership with government and regulators.

[46:19.5] Well, don't you think that's kind of what's been happening? Like that's why we had the inauguration with all the tech oligarchy up there. Because I think it's all. There isn't. I think business and government is completely aligned. I think that's why we have these policies. Well, I think maybe, you're talking about at the federal level.

[46:37.8] Yeah. At the state level in California that's not always the case, you know, and we currently have the billionaire tax. Is that a good idea? I don't think so. That's basically asking anybody who thinks they're going to build a large company to leave the state.

[46:56.2] That is actually an advocate of setting off a doom loop in our state of asking the people who are the builders who want to create jobs, to employ people, to advance things, and asking them, please don't set up shop here because if you're successful and there's a low likelihood, low probability that you'll actually be successful, you know, most startups go to zero.

[47:19.5] But there is a chance that you could build a lasting generational company. And if you do that in California, we're going to punish you. I think I could have a chilling effect. I know. I feel like it's only like if they can make $900 million, they'll probably be okay.

[47:34.8] I mean, once we get into billionaire territory, it's a whole different ball game. But I know we're, we're starting to come close to the end of our time, but I, I just wanted to quickly chime in. I think it's such an interesting point though, and I won't pretend to know all the ins and outs of California stuff because I don't live in California. But really quickly, what I do want to just say is it's a slightly lower level, but, you know, in Massachusetts we did have a million where we do have a millionaires tax.

[47:57.1] And that was the argument. People were like, everyone's going to leave. And what actually has happened is that no one left. And it's actually, we've seen more millionaires, you know, increasing here in Massachusetts. So I don't know if that would be the case or if it's equivalent at all. But you know, it certainly there's a lot of, a lot of complexity.

[48:14.3] And I do agree with you, Jarah. I think like when you have non tech people who are in these elected positions making decisions that have, you know, real impact where they truly do not understand what they're talking about, it's really problematic obviously.

[48:30.0] And I am just curious because obviously you've talked about having your own job be taken over by AI at some point in the future and you've talked about your experience and you run this platform company and all the things that you've chatted about with us. But do you still work any shifts at work while yourself?

[48:47.0] Because I think that's something you did earlier on. I was just curious if that's something you're still doing to kind of keep your hand in the mix a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I really think you have to eat your own dog food as we sometimes say. And there's such a tech, the best tech expression that everyone hates to use.

[49:05.4] You have to try your own product. Right. It's again getting back to like, you build what you know, right. And if you just sit behind your desk in an office building, an app for people who are in the field, there's a lot of learning that you're leaving on the table by not going out there. And so yes, I really encourage everybody to work shifts so that they understand, so that they meet people, they meet our customers, they meet the worker, they understand how frustrating it is if that button was hard to tap or whatever it is.

[49:33.4] I think that it is an imperative thing to do and I think it's essential for good product development to actually use your own product and see what it's like. I don't work as many as I used to, but it's really, really important and you learn so much being out in the field and being in the app.

[49:53.0] I think California is going to get through it. Right. This is a boom and bust state. We are a, hit driven state. Everything comes in waves. I don't think unrealized capital gain tax is a good thing for us, but we'll, we'll figure something out here.

[50:09.9] And I know, I feel like, and I apologize for getting us a little off track there but the time is almost up so I just wanted to end with just first of all, congratulations. I know that you just close a series B of funding which is incredible. Congratulations. So what does the future look like for you personally and for workwyle yeah.

[50:29.4] I feel like we're really just getting started. We have so much more to build. And one thing that I'm extremely excited about that we're working on is we're going to be able to share the technology we've built for our own marketplace with other businesses to be able to enable them to allow this flexible way of scheduling of working for their own employees.

[50:52.4] Right. Because again, I don't think flexibility and W2 employment are at odds philosophically. Right. It's tax code. It's a way of processing money. And there's nothing in W2 employment that says that people can't decide when and where they want to work.

[51:08.0] And so being able to put this software in the hands of other businesses so they can make these smart choices and plan for a more flexible future that everybody wants something I'm really excited about. Amazing. Thank you so much for chatting with us today.

[51:23.2] If anyone who's listening wants to learn more, where can they find you? They can just email jarretworkwild AI. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jara. Thank you.

[51:41.1] Welcome so much. City Attorney of San Francisco, David Chu. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks for having me on. Wonderful. Well, let's get right into it. We know your time is valuable. We just last week spoke with the CEO of, WorkWyle, and we know that they settled a lawsuit for $4.5 million for misclassifying its delivery drivers as independent contractors and failing to provide workers compensation.

[52:08.2] This is after the $1 million settlement which we discussed earlier as well. Can you talk us through these cases and why they're so important to worker rights? Sure. Well, maybe just taking a step back. So, I'm the City Attorney of San Francisco. I'm in my fifth year in office, and when I first came into office, I announced that worker protection would be one of the top priorities of our office, really, because we have seen in recent years so many workers who have been taken advantage of, particularly with all of the changes in the economy, which have really put workers on their back heels.

[52:43.8] Just this past year, in 2024, in my state of California, there was reported 47,000 backlogged wage theft cases that are under investigation by state authorities. And so in 2022, I started our office's first worker protection team to really expand on my office's comm to protecting the rights of workers in our city and our state.

[53:10.5] And I was surprised to discover that other offices like mine in the state had not set this up. This was really groundbreaking for offices like Mine. The mission of our team is to protect the rights of workers and to combat systemic business practices that exploit marginalized workers.

[53:28.2] And this team, it's a small team, but it's a small, mighty team. They investigate and litigate wage theft instances, employee misclassification, other abusive workplace practices. They also advise and support our city's Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which is responsible for enforcing several dozen local workplace protection ordinances, including local laws that help protect our minimum wage, paid sick leave, paid parental leave, and healthcare benefits.

[54:01.4] So that's kind of the overall context of this work. Thank you for that context. Really helpful. So when we hear from companies like WorkWhile, they're certainly not the only ones that are engaged in this kind of dynamic and situation, but they tend to frame this particular issue as a flexibility issue as opposed to employee status.

[54:21.6] But W2 employees can have flexible schedules as well. You know, there's nothing in employment law that prevents that. So in your opinion and in your office's opinion, what do you think companies like WorkWhile are actually trying to avoid when they're insisting that flexibility requires that they had these workers classified as contractors?

[54:40.0] Well, let me maybe just give a moment of context on sort of work while to understand what's happening. So this company, it's a San Francisco based temp staffing company, they've grown very quickly in the last couple years. They have a half a million workers operating in 30 major metropolitan areas across 27 states.

[55:00.9] And it's an app based company, it's a gig economy company. They provide their client businesses with workers that are hired and paid for by workwile directly to fill empty shifts. And they fill shifts in a whole slew of different industries, from delivery and warehouse to hospitality and food services, food production, event services, general labor.

[55:24.9] And these workers, they're gig workers. They're working alongside and they're really doing the same thing as employees at the client businesses. So we recently announced a major settlement of their delivery drivers.

[55:40.5] But maybe even taking a step back, we brought their lawsuit in 2024. And in late 2024 we reached our first settlement with Workwyle with regards to their non driver workers. So we're talking about workers who perform warehouse hospitality and food service work who are misclassified.

[56:00.9] And for that first tranche of workers, a million dollar settlement. And they reclassified those workers as employees rather than contractors. So what that means is those workers are getting the full set of benefits and protections that all employees in our state are entitled to.

[56:18.7] Paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, paid family leave, overtime Anti discrimination protections, workers comp, etc. So then we recently announced a second $4.5 million settlement for the delivery drivers that are misclassified by work.

[56:37.1] Wow. And from our perspective, it was really important for us to recover stolen back wages for those workers. And so thus far our lawsuit has brought $5.5 million that are directly benefiting those work wild gig workers.

[56:53.4] And we are enforcing our labor loss. And we continue to lit still another aspect of this lawsuit that is ongoing. But workwild did work to settle these aspects. From our perspective, it is important that we send a clear message that we will, not allow this illegal business model to take root.

[57:14.0] We want to ensure also at the same time that work wild we're requiring them to meet the law. We want to make sure that their competitors in the marketplace who are law abiding staffing companies, that they are no longer at a competitive disadvantage because this business model, as they underpay workers, as they not pay these workers the benefits they're due, they're gaining market share.

[57:36.8] So we want to make sure that we're standing up for those companies that are actually doing the right thing. And just to give a little context, just in the last couple years after we set up this new worker protection team, my office has secured over $28 million in settlements and judgments in these sorts of cases.

[57:56.0] 27 of the 28 million are going directly back to those workers. The remainder is coming back to our city in the form of penalties and help recoup our costs. And so that's kind of the big picture of what happened with WorkWire. That's awesome. Thank you so much for providing that context.

[58:12.8] And you talked a little bit about this, but I think for our listeners it might be really helpful to talk a little bit about the ABC rule and some of the legalities around what makes an independent contractor a contractor versus a, full time employee and how this sort of got sort of sticky for some companies.

[58:31.3] Yeah, so under the law, there's a certain test that we use in the state of California to make it clear whether a worker is performing work in the usual course of a hiring entity's business that makes them an employee rather than an independent contractor.

[58:48.2] And in California that's referred to as the ABC test, which is a pretty common test in many states around the country. So under the so called ABC test, a worker is considered an employee and not an independent contractor unless the hiring entity satisfies all of the following three conditions, and that's A, B and C.

[59:11.5] So A, the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work. B, the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of a hiring entity's business and C, the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade occupation or business of the same nature as that involved in the worker performed.

[59:43.6] Now, what I'll mention is the B prong is often very important in the cases that we have litigated. In many of these cases, as was the case with workwile, the usual course of business is providing temp workers workers to clients.

[59:59.2] And therefore the folks who are doing this temp work are doing the usual course of work. Wow's work. And so, you know, we're proud that California's ABC test really remains the gold standard. And our ability to successfully get WorkWhile and other companies like WorkWile to reclassify their workers and pay back their workers was directly the result of California's ABC test, which has been leading the nation for how we determine employee status.

[60:29.9] Thank you for clarifying that a little bit further. I know it can be very complicated for people who aren't, you know, engaged in like, employment law or who aren't, you know, business owners. And even for myself and Rachel, I'm, I'm flashing back to early days in our business journey.

[60:45.4] This was probably What, Rachel, like 10 plus, 10 years ago, we had our first time here. Yes. Our like, you know, freak out moment with our lawyer at the time know about how to classify and how to hire and it's a lot. And I guess with that in mind, I am curious.

[61:01.1] So obviously, you know, this, this judge, these two judgments that you've talked about with workwile, there's probably been other cases too. How do you, as in, in the course of your office and sort of your purview, how do you decide what is worthwhile to go after when a company like workwyle is engaged in practices that you believe are in violation of the ABC test?

[61:23.3] Like what makes it a case that your office want pursue or things that they have a good, good chance at, winning in? I want to go back to one of your earlier questions around how there are companies like Work Wild that are trying to frame what they're doing as a flexibility issue versus employee status?

[61:41.8] Because the fact of the matter is W2 employees can have flexible schedules. WorkWyle was not the first time that we have seen an app based company try to disguise their inequities as innovation or flexibility in fact, there are a lot of gig companies that are trying to push that false narrative.

[62:02.5] From our perspective, employee status is not incompatible with flexibility. So this is actually the third major case that we have brought sort of in this space. And I'll just mention some of the other companies that we've had to pursue was a company known as quic, which is now operating as QUIC or Gig Pro, a second company called GigSmart, and this company, WorkWire.

[62:25.7] All three of these companies sort of prove our point. In each of these instances. These businesses are able to now offer their temp gig workers the flexibility to pick and choose their shifts at their discretion, but they're treating them as employees because of our lawsuit, because of the settlements that we reached with these companies.

[62:48.5] And just to, mention it, early part of 2024, we reached a first of its kind $2.1 million settlement with the company that I refer to as Quick, which is a hospitality staffing app that required that company to convert all of its misclassified California workers to employees.

[63:07.9] And then In January of 2025, we reached a similar agreement with the, the Gig Smart company that I mentioned, which is a temp staffing app. All three companies, Quic Gig Smart Workwile, were violating numerous labor and employment laws.

[63:25.4] And again, what that meant was work low wage workers were having their wages stolen going to these companies. And these companies were trying to hide behind their marketing around the convenience and flexibility of an app to deny these workers rights and benefits and protections.

[63:46.3] And, the reason we chose these three companies was we saw that these were companies that were growing very quickly. And we were concerned that if their illegal business models really took root, there would be hundreds of thousands of positions in the hospitality industry, food services, event production, delivery industries, temp agencies that would be pushing this illegal misclassification model.

[64:14.0] We would see thousands of workers being pushed into poverty. And we decided to go after each of these companies because their, their business models were taking root and we wanted to make sure that the law was being upheld. As you can imagine, for these workers, these shifts are really grueling.

[64:32.0] And it's also particularly galling when you have these workers working alongside their colleagues for those client companies that are receiving the full range of benefits as employees and their full wages. And so we wanted to make sure that we're leveling the playing field.

[64:50.4] One other thing I'll just mention that was particularly egregious about workwyle was they were not providing the legally required workers compensation insurance, but instead they charge their workers a fee that they branded as a trust and safety fee which funded a substandard insurance like product which literally shifted the cost of workers compensation type protection from the employer to the low wage workers.

[65:23.3] And so all this being put together when our office looked at this, we can't tolerate companies that are denying workers rights and benefits or attempting to shift costs onto workers. And that's why we decided we needed to act in these instances.

[65:38.8] Just as a quick follow up, thank you for that. I'm just having like flashbacks. So Rachel and I both came up in the tech space and obviously a lot of these app and gig companies are operating that industry as well. And I'm just thinking back to previous jobs where it was so egregious across the board in terms of, you know, working with independent contractors alongside full time employees.

[66:00.7] And the only time we would actually even know the difference was when the contractors wouldn't get invited to the holiday party because they weren't full time employees. And I'm just thinking back to like how many instances of just how normalized that was in the companies that we both have worked for and with.

[66:17.2] And so I think it's heartening in a lot of ways to see you and your office do this kind of litigation because it is, you mentioned the word inequity earlier and that really, you know, hits home for us because I think it's, it's, you know, not even an issue of fairness for the employees, but just overall for everyone.

[66:35.3] Like the small companies who are bending over backwards to fulfill these requirements and then these large companies, companies who kind of had this attitude, I think in a lot of senses of we're too big to care, you know, we'll just throw some money at it and go away kind of thing. So. Well, I'll mention, and this is a part of my background I rarely talk about, but early in my career I spent almost a decade in tech and I helped to found and served for years as general counsel to a technology company.

[67:04.0] And this issue came up. I remember educating myself on the ABC test and thinking, boy, this test has a bunch of requirements. But as we ran through the test, I would have to explain to my colleagues at the company that we can't characterize aspects of our workforce as independent contractors rather than employees, even though it would be cheaper for us and despite the pressures that we had to cut our costs.

[67:32.8] And I remember having those conversations. I remember diving deep into the ABC test and thinking at the time the question was, well, are, our competitors doing the same? And I told my folks, listen, we have to abide by the law here. This is what the law is. And our hope is that other companies were abiding by the law.

[67:50.2] But what we found over the years is that there are companies like some of the companies that I've just mentioned today, who made very different decisions. And those companies saw their market share grow and saw their cost savings and their boards and their investors were okay with those decisions.

[68:06.6] And again, this is why it's so important for offices like mine to stand up for the law. And I will tell you, since we've been doing this work in the last couple years, other offices around California that are similarly situated like mine are starting worker protection teams because they're seeing workforces that are engaging or that are being victimized by wage theft and that are losing benefits.

[68:31.1] And all of us need to hold the line here. The law is what the law is and we need to make sure that workers are not subject to wage theft and not getting healthcare and not getting the benefits that the law provides them. Make me want, to tear up a little bit there because it is so important.

[68:47.6] And I think that the, the timing for this is also so critical as I think there is a growing awareness of worker inequity. Sort of, it's like, you know, we had it 100 years ago and we kind of lost it with everything that's happened. So I just want to acknowledge that the work that you're doing is so important and we're really grateful for it.

[69:07.0] And it is kind of in relation to the last question that I have for you, which is when thinking about the work that we're doing, and you mentioned that you were in the tech space, but we're thinking about a lot of the people that are listening to this, our HR leaders, organizational decision makers.

[69:22.4] From your perspective, just really curious to hear your thoughts. What's a genuinely worker centered future of work look like? Is it possible to build in the flexibility, technology and fair treatment? Do you feel like there's just too much tension? Can we get into a way that feels equitable for everyone?

[69:38.8] I think a worker center future of work respects the rights and the well being of workers with fair wages and benefits and certainly at the least is abiding by the very laws in the cities and states that these workforces work and where these companies are based.

[69:59.0] As I said before, innovation doesn't have to come at the cost of equity. Our track record on these lawsuits demonstrates that the convenience of these gig apps don't need to come at the expense of thousands of Workers rights.

[70:16.0] I'll mention another case that we recently brought to a settlement involved a number of delivery service partners for Amazon. And we were able to bring several million dollars back to those workers for the same reason. But I will say I don't think it's accidental that I am doing this work in San Francisco and in California.

[70:37.5] Because in California there are two things that are true at the same time. We have seen remarkable successes by our technology and innovative sectors. But we also have strong rules for workers. And from our perspective, a worker center future that is already here.

[70:53.5] We just need companies to follow the law. And the settlements and judgments that we've announced really highlights the importance of upholding these laws. And there's often this expression about how you, know the future. We are seeing it in California.

[71:09.8] In our state, we're trying to both balance supporting an innovative economy, but making sure that that innovative economy is lifting everybody up. There are two trends that are happening right now in our country that we're all incredibly concerned about. One is the widening gap, the inequality that we're seeing between our lowest paid workers and CEOs and the folks who started and run these companies.

[71:37.6] And part of what these laws are trying to do is to make sure that there's fairness. We want to have incentives for entrepreneurs, and founders of companies and the CEOs of companies to do well, but it cannot come at the expense of workers.

[71:53.0] And it certainly can't come at the expense of stealing wages from workers and stealing benefits from workers. The other trend that we're seeing, and we're now having a national, if not international conversation, is around affordability, about whether everyday working families can afford to pay for food and healthcare and housing and electricity.

[72:15.6] And part of how we address that is making sure that workers actually are, bringing home the wages that they deserve and making sure that millions of dollars are not stolen from them. Making sure that benefits are not stolen from them. And again, that's why this enforcement work is so important in California.

[72:33.7] We really are trying to build this worker center future of work in the heart of the innovative economy. And that's why it's important for us to keep engaging in all this enforcement and this work. Thank you so much, Attorney Chu. I know your time is limited, so we really appreciate you spending some time kind of laying this out for us and talking us through some of these cases and dynamics that you've chatted us through before we let you go.

[72:59.3] Is there anywhere that people can go to if they want to learn more, support the work that you're doing or just get. Get more educated around these. These topics that we've discussed today. Absolutely. So a couple things I'll mention, folks can visit our [email protected] for San FranciscoCityattorney.org we describe the cases that I've just discussed here.

[73:20.6] If there are workers who are wondering if they are in a similar situation as the workers at Workwill or some of these other companies I mentioned, they can report complaints to us. If there are folks who are listening to this call from other I should mention I have the authority in San Francisco to bring these sorts of cases on behalf of the people of the state of California, but my jurisdiction does not cross my state lines.

[73:47.4] And so the wins we've gotten for our workers in California do not accrue to workers in other states. So there are 49 other states and there are lots of folks like me who I'm hoping are looking at companies that are engaged in these practices and thinking about similar enforcement actions.

[74:06.7] And if there are, we would love to hear from them. We're happy to partner with them and want to be helpful. And then the last thing I will say, I just want to thank you guys for uplifting these cases because these issues, as you know, are technical, are often somewhat esoteric in labor and employment law.

[74:24.8] A lot of workers don't understand what rights they have. And so it's really important to put the word out on these issues and these rights and always happy to be of part. Part of helping educate the public on this. Oh, thank you so much. We just so appreciate your time and we hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day.

[74:41.8] Thank you. Of course. Thank you. Well, we did it, y'. All. So we hope you enjoyed listening to this interview as much as we enjoyed the conversations. Yes, both of them. Thank you so much for listening, as always. And please don't forget to rate, share and subscribe.

[74:58.1] It really does make a huge, huge difference in the reach of this podcast and by extension, our work. Super quick side note, I told Rachel I was like, I have something extra to add in today. So I recently took a look at our ratings and reviews on our podcast, which we don't really look at regularly and we haven't had a rating or review in a couple years.

[75:16.4] So, listeners, please, I beg you, if you like what we're doing, please let us know. We really want to hear the good, the bad, the ugly. So pop a race rating or review on that podcast. Yeah, I mean, if you don't like it, though. Like, you don't need to. You don't need to put a 1. But you know, you can give us feedback, though.

[75:34.1] We'll just take. Like, you could email us and like, yes, tell us how we could improve. We'll take constructive feedback. We do. And as we always say, feedback is a gift and we will accept it even if we don't like it. But in all seriousness, please do rate and subscribe and share and all the things.

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[76:07.4] Stay geeky. Bye.