Hustle and Gig

Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy

Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520971899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

Choose your hours, choose your work, be your own boss, control your own income. Welcome to the sharing economy, a nebulous collection of online platforms and apps that promise to transcend capitalism. Supporters argue that the gig economy will reverse economic inequality, enhance worker rights, and bring entrepreneurship to the masses. But does it? In Hustle and Gig, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle shares the personal stories of nearly eighty predominantly millennial workers from Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Kitchensurfing. Their stories underline the volatility of working in the gig economy: the autonomy these young workers expected has been usurped by the need to maintain algorithm-approved acceptance and response rates. The sharing economy upends generations of workplace protections such as worker safety; workplace protections around discrimination and sexual harassment; the right to unionize; and the right to redress for injuries. Discerning three types of gig economy workers—Success Stories, who have used the gig economy to create the life they want; Strugglers, who can't make ends meet; and Strivers, who have stable jobs and use the sharing economy for extra cash—Ravenelle examines the costs, benefits, and societal impact of this new economic movement. Poignant and evocative, Hustle and Gig exposes how the gig economy is the millennial's version of minimum-wage precarious work.

1

Strugglers, Strivers, and Success Stories

Sarah was unemployed.¹ After leaving a position in casting for a critically acclaimed Netflix show, the twenty-nine-year-old waited for a series of promised jobs that never panned out. A friend recommended TaskRabbit.

At first, Sarah thought the site was a waste of time, but the traditional nine-to-five jobs she was finding elsewhere were unappealing. “Everything I wanted to do pretty much didn’t pay, like film work,” she said. “So I just kind of stayed with TaskRabbit. I could build a schedule, and it was just really reliable. I couldn’t believe that I could make a living off of it.”

Before long, more than 90 percent of her income was coming from TaskRabbit, and Sarah made plans for her first “actual vacation,” a trip to Puerto Rico. A week before her trip, TaskRabbit announced its first pivot, changing from a bidding marketplace to more of a temporary-agency model, with Tasker availability posted in four-hour increments. Workers were required to respond to client emails within thirty minutes and accept 85 percent of their offered gigs.

“I was just freaking out the entire time, and I didn’t know if I should spend any money on fun things on my vacation. I didn’t know what was going to happen, and [TaskRabbit] kept saying it was a really good thing,” she said. “But [the Taskers] kept saying, ‘It’s not a good thing,’ and everyone was really worried.”

Concerned that she would slip below the 85 percent acceptance rate, Sarah felt a lot of pressure to accept any work she was offered. “I had no control over what I would be getting and when. So I just took pretty much everything that I could,” she said, including cleaning an apartment that she described as “a crack den.” She told me, “I was actually nervous in there. . . . You would think that a lot of drugs happened there—basically everything just looked like it was covered in dirt and mud. It almost looked like there was mud even on the pillows. And I was like, ‘I can vacuum and clean your bathroom.’”

But being picky about tasks has its own risks. In Sarah’s experience, TaskRabbit’s algorithm highlights people with high acceptance rates or high availability. “They want you on call for free,” she said, before describing her schedule instability as “frustrating. . . . [Y]ou are always thinking, ‘Oh, in five months I am going to be [sleeping] on a bench somewhere.’”

Baran, twenty-eight, is a college student at a local university who drives for Uber and Lyft. In New York, app-based drivers have the same insurance and licensing requirements as taxi drivers, a cost that usually runs several thousand dollars. To sidestep this considerable start-up expense and the associated annual costs, some drivers rent a licensed, insured, and Uber-approved car through local services or utilize Uber’s fleet-owner and driver matching service. Baran rents such a car for four hundred dollars a week. “You have to work at least three days to just cover your [car] expenses,” he says. “Two days for the rent, and one more day sometimes for the gas and other things. After the three days, whatever you make, it just belongs to you.”

Baran works twelve-hour shifts, from eight a.m. to eight p.m., on his workdays and tries to make $250 per day after accounting for the Uber fees, but before paying for tolls. He showed me his weekly earnings: most were under $800. His earnings showed a single week of making over $1,000. “That week I was really lucky,” he said. “I kept going back and forth to the airport. It was like finding a unicorn.”

In the tech world, a “unicorn” is a statistical rarity, a privately held start-up worth over a billion dollars.² In Baran’s experience of driving for Uber, making a thousand dollars—before paying for weekly car rental expenses—is equally mythical.

Baran describes his costs as “spending money to make money,” but each week he incurs a considerable debt that he must work off before he can earn the money he needs for rent and food. He’s thankful he isn’t using one of the Uber or Santander financing programs (discussed in chapter 3), either of which, he says, amounts to “a deep hole” and “modern slavery.” But his current pay-to-work situation also sounds suspiciously like indentured servitude, a practice outlawed more than a hundred years ago.

“The sharing economy is the term which they use for getting around rules so they don’t have to pay taxes. . . . I’m not a partner. I’m an independent contractor. Partner means that you are sharing somewhat, because you are partners. All of the costs have been covered by me. . . . I’m not a partner. I’m an independent contractor. They can kick me out anytime they want. If I was a partner, they couldn’t do that,” he said. “They can do whatever they want. [Uber] became a forty-billion-dollar company. What can you do?”

Baran tries to not think about his gig work too much. “Uber is for me—it’s like I go to an isolated place. I don’t want to, you know, bring anything home from that place to my normal life,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to think I have something to do with it.”

Shaun, thirty-seven, an African American male, is another New York City transplant. Previously living in Westchester, a suburb north of New York City, he turned to TaskRabbit when the cleaning service he was affiliated with couldn’t provide any work. “I came to New York City basically out of desperation to find some type of work,” he said.

When I met Shaun, he was splitting his time between two part-time gigs: four days a week as a part-time personal assistant and two to three days a week on TaskRabbit. “Normally I try and set goals, saying, ‘If I make at least two hundred dollars in two days, then I could just rest on a Sunday,’” he said. “The only thing that I kind of regret is that I lack a social life.”

Working seven days a week doesn’t leave much time for friends, but Shaun has credit card debt and firsthand experience with the challenges of finding housing on a low income. “I was homeless a couple of times before. I was literally living on the streets,” he said. “Since it was September and it was still warm, I decided to just stay on the streets versus going to the shelter. Every once in a while I’d actually go to Airbnb and get some place to sleep. But I mostly remained on the streets until I was able to afford a place where I could go weekly. The first place I went to was Long Island City [a neighborhood in Queens]; but the roommate was an asshole, so I moved into an illegally run hostel. When I got tired of that, I moved to a room. And I’ve been there ever since.”

“The personal assistant job is enough by itself to rent the room and take care of myself, but it is not enough to help me unload the credit card debt and to save up money,” he explained. “So this basically helps me save money and to help get rid of debt. . . . I’m not planning on doing this for long; I’m just trying until I can work at a stable job. . . . [A]nd then afterwards I’ll do TaskRabbit once in a while just for extra money, instead of depending on it like a second job.”

Shaun doesn’t think of himself as a entrepreneur. “I think of myself as a hustler,” he said. “Basically, right now I’m just money-motivated. I have the attitude where I am basically doing things that I don’t think I can do to get by. So there are times when I would look at a job, and someone might say, ‘You’re sure you can handle it?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’”

Unlike driving for Uber or working as a Kitchensurfing chef, Taskers can be hired for a variety of tasks. In some cases, Shaun has proven to be a quick study, such as when it came to building Ikea furniture. “The one thing that I’ve done that I kind of regret doing was [when] someone hired me to tune a door handle, one of those automatic door handles. And I went there thinking I know what’s going on—until I looked at the door handle,” he said. “It took me like a good thirty minutes to figure it out, but not before the [door swung out and the] glass hit the desk. They gave me a negative review, saying, ‘I don’t think he knows what he’s doing.’”

Shaun has since sworn off fixing automatic doors. And after getting injured on a TaskRabbit gig, he’s also stopped accepting moving tasks. “I helped lift a dresser. Had to pull [it] up a flight of stairs. It was two dressers, and even though I had assistance, I’m carrying stuff that weighs about 125, and my current abilities can only allow me to carry 50 pounds. So yeah, I stretched my back, and I just walked out of there saying, ‘I’m okay.’ But when I’m out, I’m like, ‘Ouch.’ My mind thinks I’m twenty-five, but my body is way older,” he said with a chuckle. “And I keep telling myself, ‘Yeah, let me just lose a couple of pounds, let me just lose the stomach or at least get my flexibility back before doing things like that again.’”

The stories from these twentysomething and thirtysomething workers underline the volatility of working in the twenty-first-century gig economy. Taking jobs in what has been heralded as a futuristic utopia of choose-your-own-adventure employment with flexible schedules and unlimited earnings, these young workers have instead found themselves working long hours for little pay and less stability. The autonomy they expected—work when you want, doing what you want—has been usurped by the need to maintain algorithm-approved acceptance and response rates. Sarah and Shaun find themselves pressured to accept unpleasant tasks, constantly hustling, while every week Baran must earn more than four hundred dollars just to break even on his Uber rental. Rather than finding financial freedom, these workers find themselves on the losing side of an outsourcing equation where they are responsible for platform “service fees” and encounter workplace expenses usually financed by employers. The promise of modern-day, app-driven entrepreneurship has yielded the bleak employment and living conditions of the early industrial age.

THE SHARING ECONOMY IS A MOVEMENT FORWARD TO THE PAST

Welcome to the sharing economy, a nebulous collection of online platforms and apps that promise to transcend capitalism in favor of community. Supporters argue that this new economic movement, alternatively described as the on-demand, platform, or gig economy, will build community, reverse economic inequality, stop ecological destruction, counter materialistic tendencies, enhance worker rights, empower the poor, and bring entrepreneurship to the masses.³ The sharing economy promises both an idyllic, boss-free future, where workers control their incomes and hours, and to be a cure-all for the woes of modern society.

Yet for all of its app-enabled modernity, the gig economy resembles the early industrial age, where workers worked long hours in a piecemeal system, workplace safety was nonexistent, and there were few options for redress. Despite its focus on emerging technology—apps, smartphones, contactless payment systems and review systems—the sharing economy is truly a movement forward to the past. Workers find themselves outside even the most basic workplace protections regarding discrimination and sexual harassment, the right to unionize, and even the right to redress for workplace injuries. The sharing economy is upending generations of workplace protections in the name of disruption and returning to a time when worker exploitation was the norm.

This book explores contradictions between the lofty promises of the gig economy and the lived experience of the workers, between app-enabled modernity and the reality of rolling back generations of workplace protections.

The sharing economy promises flexibility and work-life balance, but while Baran works only four days a week, those days are twelve-hour shifts. Sarah and Shaun are free from reporting to a single employer, but the gig economy increasingly tethers them to work: they’re constantly on call, hustling to make money. Thanks to service algorithms, the decision to work isn’t always in their hands. The gig economy offers “flexibility,” but if they spend too much time away from the platform, they may discover they’ve been “removed from the community,” or “deactivated.”

When it comes to the sharing economy’s promise to bring entrepreneurship to the masses, their careers diverge even more. Sarah doesn’t think of herself as an entrepreneur, but TaskRabbit tells her she is, and that the service is “incentivizing” her entrepreneurship through its commission structure. Yet successful Airbnb entrepreneurs (discussed further in chapter 7) are described by the platform as “bad actors” who are using the service to run de facto hotels, instead of just making extra money on the side.⁴ And Shaun? He’s just hustling.

Much like fledgling entrepreneurs, gig economy workers find that getting work often requires doing unpaid work. Workers must maintain profiles and respond to emails from prospective clients or even just keep clicking “refresh” on their app—all of which is unpaid work. Sarah and Shaun are not always being paid to work, but they are always working. And Baran is “spending money to make money,” but his ability to make money is dictated by Ub...