When you order food through an app and tip the worker who delivers it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the money you give goes directly to that person. But in reality, some delivery apps use your tip to make up the worker’s base pay — essentially stealing the money you’re trying to give someone to maximize their profits.

I was raised in a company house, in a company town, where the miners had to buy their own oilers – that is, rubber coveralls – drill bits, and other tools at the company store.

That company, Inco Limited, the world’s leading producer of nickel for most of the 20th century, controlled the town of Sudbury, Ontario, but never succeeded in owning the souls of the men and women who lived and worked there.

That’s because these were union men and women: self-possessed, a little rowdy, and well aware that puny pleas from individual workers fall on deaf corporate ears.