Kerim's Triptych ❧ Shiftkey Nurses, Walter Benjamin, Double King

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1️⃣ Shiftkey Nurses

A new report by the Roosevelt Institute, written up here by Cory Doctorow, describes how nurses are being turned into gig workers in the most dystopian way possible. Rather than being hired as full-time employees, nurses are assigned jobs via an app like Shiftkey which:

• Requires nurses to stay available when they might be needed (i.e. not take any other jobs), but doesn't guarantee that they will actually get work and be paid during those times. As Doctorow explains, "Nurses assume all the risk that there won't be enough demand for their services."
• Uses "commercially available financial data . . . to predict how desperate each nurse is" and then uses this data to assign different pay scales to each nurse. Yes, this is normally illegal, but somehow it's OK because it is an app?
• "⁠Shiftkey workers also have to bid against one another for shifts, with the job going to the ⁠⁠worker who accepts the lowest wage"
• That isn't all! They also are forced to pay fees for insurance and even a per-day and per-shift charge for using the app, thus subsidizing the tool of their own exploitation.

As Doctorow explains, "capitalists hate capitalism" and so seek to shift all the risks associated with capitalism onto others. Shiftkey and similar apps allow commercially run hospitals to shift the risks associated with uncertain demand onto the nurses themselves. Needless to say, apps like this make it even harder for people to organize into unions to resist such practices.

2️⃣ The Last Days of Walter Benjamin

I always knew that Walter Benjamin took his own life while fleeing from the Nazis at the Franco-Spanish border, but I never knew the details. Dan Hancox has investigated those details, even tracing the route on foot.

The story he tells is tragic, but not without moments of (tragi)comedy, such as when Benjamin and a friend tried to pretend they were sailors on a freight ship: "Benjamin, with his thick spectacles and pensive aspect, and Frankel, a fragile man with grey hair, were entirely unconvincing in their disguise; they were found out immediately and put ashore."

We also learn that The Walter Benjamin Centre of Contemporary Art in southern France removed Walter Benjamin's name from their title. It turns out that his descendants had requested this because the town was the "the first French city with a population of more than 100,000 to fall" to the far-right National Rally run by Marine Le Pen.

Benjamin "spent his last night on Earth sleeping rough in the clearing on that hillside, without a blanket or any provisions, clutching only his briefcase with the manuscript inside." He was buried in Portbou, Spain, where some words from that manuscript are inscribed on the headstone:

“There is no document of civilisation that is not also a document of barbarism.”

3️⃣ Double King

With over ninety million views there is a good chance you already watched Double King, one of the most popular animated shorts on YouTube, but I only recently discovered the work of Australian animator Felix Colgrave. His work reminds me a bit of the work Terry Gilliam did for Monty Python, but music is much more important in Colgrave's work, which has a kinetic quality to it.

(I really try to have at least one artistic piece each week, but can't always manage it. I hope to do better this year!)

Endnote

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