Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Yee-haw, Tucson! It’s time to cast your ballots in the second round of voting in Best of Tucson® 2021: Legends of the West! Vote here for the Best of Tucson awards!
That’s right, pardner: We’re down to the final showdown! Earlier this summer, we took your nominations for Tucson’s best shops, parks, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bands and all the other stuff that makes this dusty cowtown the place to be!
Now we have five nominees in hundreds of categories and it’s time to crown the final winners in the rootin’est, tootin’est issue of the year. Vote now through Sept. 1.
Peter Young was napping between blood draws when his ringing phone woke him.
He was lying in a hospital bed in Los Angeles as part of a five-day clinical trial that required his blood to be drawn every two hours. It’s not a job most people sign up for eagerly, but for Young, 27, it seemed like a dream opportunity. His full-time job is delivering food for Postmates.
“This will pay a lot more for the time I am spending than rideshare,” Young said. “I’m in a hospital bed right now. That’s why I was napping – because I am physically beat up.”
Young has been a part of the gig economy, working for rideshare and food delivery apps, for about four years. He used to drive for Uber and Lyft, but since the pandemic, he only has been delivering food. Although Young relies on the income from Postmates to survive, he said the job’s unreliability is taking a toll on his financial and mental well-being.
“I can’t plan for the future. I can’t be confident in what income I will have in six months, and that is really stressful.”
Gig workers are considered independent contractors rather than traditional employees, so they don’t receive such benefits as health insurance and retirement programs. Many, like Young, are freelance delivery workers or drivers called to service through such apps as Lyft and DoorDash.
Gig work can give people flexibility and freedom, but some experts believe it also exposes them to inconsistent, low pay and the possibility of exploitation for the sake of customer convenience. The work became even riskier during COVID-19, which put thousands of people out of jobs.
In response, efforts to unionize gig drivers are underway in several major cities. Strikes are planned for July 21 in Boston, San Francisco and elsewhere – coming amid a shortage of Uber and Lyft drivers across the country.
“While they don’t have long-term security from a particular organization and also a lot of the benefits the organizations provide people with, they exchange that for being able to have greater control over what kind of work they do when they do it and how they do it,” said Brianna Caza, associate professor in the department of management at University of North Carolina Greensboro.
A transition to food delivery in COVID-19
During the pandemic, many drivers for rideshare were unable to find work driving for Uber or Lyft because of the risks of getting COVID-19.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
WASHINGTON – Arizona Democrats called on Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate the state Senate’s audit of Maricopa County election returns, which they said Friday is little more than a “sham audit” disguising a series of politically motivated attacks.
Their demands come as a congressional panel has launched its own investigation into Cyber Ninjas, the private firm that was contracted to do the audit that is still ongoing after six months.
A House Oversight subcommittee on Wednesday gave Cyber Ninjas two weeks to produce documents showing their experience, their policies, how they are paid and what communication they had, if any, with former President Donald Trump, who has insisted on audits like Arizona’s.
State Democrats welcomed the federal probe, which they hoped would spur Brnovich to do the same.
“Unless he (Brnovich) agrees to investigate, there is no other conclusion we can draw upon, other than that he doesn’t care about Trump’s reported election interference,” Arizona Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios said Friday.
Rios was joined by House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding and Arizona Democratic Party Chair Raquel Terán at a news conference in which they said Brnovich needs to take action immediately to stop the “illegal behavior” they said has been seen in the audit.
Requests for comment from both Brnovich and Cyber Ninjas were not immediately returned Friday. But in a meeting Thursday with Senate Republicans, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan defended his company’s performance in the audit, now six months old, and said its operations have been transparent throughout.
Monday, July 19, 2021
WASHINGTON – The private firms auditing Maricopa County elections told senators Thursday they have finished reviewing the more than 2 million ballots, but will not be able to deliver a complete report without cooperation from county officials.
That led Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to threaten to take the county “back to court” to force compliance – one day after a judge said Fann and the auditors need to comply with county requests for public records in what critics call a “sham audit.”
The comments came during an update of the audit, now six months old, in which no questions or comments were taken and auditors spent much of the time defending their actions and criticizing opponents.
Senate Democrats did not attend the session on the audit, which one said “is clearly an attempt to sow distrust in our election system.”
“At the end of the day, this is Sen. Fann and one other Republican bringing in essentially their clients, their paid clients, to have this back-and-forth conversation, and quite honestly, perpetuate a lot of the conspiracy theories that they’ve been throwing out,” said Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios.
Rios said Democrats only learned of the meeting 17 hours before it started.
“This is not a hearing,” Rios said. “If it were a true hearing, we would have had to have been noticed 24 hours in advance, and it would have had to have been held in front of a committee which would include Democrats and Republicans.”
But Fann, a Prescott Republican, and Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, were the only two lawmakers at the more than two-hour event, in which former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and CyFIR CEO Ben Cotton laid out progress of the audit.
