Gigged Page 14
Dear Mr. Bezos,
I am a Turker: middle age, entrepreneur, university student, mom, wife, reliant on my mTurk income to keep my family safe from foreclosure. I don’t Turk for $1.45 per hour nor do I live in a developing country, I am a skilled and intelligent worker, and I Turk as my main source of income and it is currently my chosen career. I am a human being, not an algorithm, and yet Requesters seem to think I am there just to serve their bidding. They do not respect myself and my fellow Turkers with a fair wage, and in fact say that we should be thankful we get anything near to minimum wage for the “easy” work we do. Searching for work all day isn’t easy. Having to find and install scripts to become more efficient isn’t easy. Dealing with unfair rejections isn’t easy. Being a Turker isn’t easy.
I ask that you look towards not selling us as cheap labour, but instead as highly skilled labourers who offer an efficient way to get work done. Paying each of us less than fairly isn’t the way to save money, but instead using a huge workforce available at any hour of the day is what will reduce costs. Please stop selling us as nothing more than an algorithm and instead introduce those who use your service to the fact we are living, breathing beings who are using this money not to buy beer, but to feed, clothe and shelter our families. If you could facilitate our communication with Requesters somehow, be it through a forum or just presenting our stories to them, I think it would change their perception of us for the better. Remember: the more that they pay us, the more fees you make. The better they treat us, the better the results they get, and the more likely they are to stick around. The better mTurk’s reputation, the more new Requesters will use the service. When Turkers are happy, Requesters are happy, and Amazon will be happy, too.
Thanks for reading,
Kristy Milland
Amazon did not publicly acknowledge the letter campaign. It did not change its branding of Mechanical Turk. It did not create a minimum wage or a new worker rating system. Nor did it create a system in which workers could better communicate with Amazon.
However, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Fast Company Magazine, and Wired all covered the campaign. “The goals of the campaign, which hopes to eventually beam hundreds of letters into Jeff Bezos’s inbox, are as varied as the Turkers themselves,” wrote The Guardian. “Some just want to celebrate Mechanical Turk’s flexibility and bite-size tasks. Others are demanding a more modern website that allows them to market themselves to employers and, in return, rate companies as good or bad to work for.”24
Amazon responded to at least one letter, in which a Turker in India had written to say that his paper checks often got lost in the mail.25 Soon after, the company enabled bank transfers to India. When I talked with Kristy in early 2015, she was optimistic about the implications of this small victory and the media attention.
“I think workers know now that they can work toward change,” she said, “and the word is out that we’re human beings. So now, the question is, how else do we get ourselves to be more visible? What do workers want? And how do we mobilize them to try new campaigns?” She wanted to keep the momentum going. “We built a foundation that shows, yep, we could absolutely get together and do things,” she said. “What’s next?”
After finishing her degree in psychology within four years, Kristy decided to get her master’s in labor studies. She had started calling herself an activist and speaking at events all around the world: at Carnegie Mellon, at the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, to the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats in the European Parliament. She spoke in Berlin, Brussels, and Rome.
While speaking in Brussels, Kristy learned that the Swedish white-collar trade union Unionen had started to incorporate freelancers. That gave her faith in unions as a model for organizing non-traditional workers. Her faith in Dynamo, though, didn’t last.
In 2016, almost two years after Kristy started the Amazon Mechanical Turk letter-writing campaign, I checked in with her again. While Dynamo had added 470 users in its first six months, in the last year and a half it had only added about 75. The most recent campaign idea had been posted seven months earlier by one of the researchers who built the site.
The researchers who started Dynamo had moved on to other projects, and nobody had the time to keep it alive. The latest project to have achieved 25 votes aimed to create a badge academic task posters could use on their profiles as a signal that they followed the Dynamo ethical guidelines. But according to Kristy, nobody ever volunteered to actually design it.
Amazon, meanwhile, had effectively hampered Dynamo by interfering with its sign-up process. In winter 2015, it removed the Mechanical Turk tasks that Dynamo had used to distribute sign-up codes, saying that they violated the terms of service by “requiring registration at another website or group.” No federal laws protect collective organizing in the gig economy. And whether it was this interference from Amazon or the lack of manpower that had led to Dynamo’s demise, Kristy had by then lost her belief in virtual organizing as an effective lever for change. Dynamo at that point looked more like a ghost town than the future of labor organizing.26
CHAPTER 11
UBER FOR POLITICS
Politicians noticed the gig economy and its promise to shape the future of work sometime around 2015.
That September, I met Mark Warner, the senior US senator from Virginia, in New York City, at one of those hole-in-the-wall delis that serve coffee in Styrofoam cups. Warner, a tall man, conservatively dressed in a dark suit, was seated so close to a cooler that he had to move his stainless steel chair every time someone wanted to buy an orange juice.
The senator was as well positioned as anyone in Congress to understand the changes wrought by the gig economy. Before becoming a politician, he’d been a venture capitalist, making a fortune by investing in early wireless phone businesses. A Democrat who shared his party’s concerns for working people’s rights and wages, he was also the third wealthiest man in Congress. He’d positioned himself as both pro-business and pro-workers, and he’d gotten in touch with me after I’d written an article about how the realities of working in the gig economy didn’t live up to the pitch.
Over the last several months, Senator Warner and his staff had met with gig economy executives from a range of companies including Lyft, Postmates, and Handy. He’d also been hosting round-table conversations with gig economy workers in Virginia. “Eight or nine months into this,” he told me, “I’m more sure than ever that this is a fundamental shift in the economy and is going to accelerate.”
In 2015, only about 0.5% of all US workers had participated in Silicon Valley’s labor revolution.1 (In the UK, the percentage was higher: The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimated in 2017 that 4% of all UK workers have participated in the gig economy.2) Warner knew that the startup world’s version of the gig economy was still, in the context of the wider economy, only as big as a rounding error. It was so small that companies often wondered out loud why journalists, and now politicians, worried so much about its impact. But he didn’t really have much sympathy for that argument. “You can’t have it both ways,” he argued. “You can’t say, ‘give me this valuation as I’m pitching this world transformation,’ and then say, ‘why are policy makers interested?’ When Airbnb has more rooms than Marriott, and Uber has 250,000 drivers and dramatically disrupts a market, it will attract attention.”
The gig economy’s outsized influence and growth trajectory were one reason Mark Warner had to be interested in this small subset of startups. The second was that the gig economy made a perfect vehicle for talking about a problem that stretched beyond Silicon Valley. At the heart of it was a new status quo throughout the United States and much of the world: Risk had migrated from companies to workers.
This was true of those who had watched their employment opportunities, over decades, become increasingly fractured into a web of contractors, freelancers, temps, and other non-traditional employment. It was also true of employees with full-t
ime jobs, who, unlike gig workers, were covered under all labor protection laws but had still seen the holes in their safety nets widen. Evidence of what the political scientist Jacob Hacker had called “The Great Risk Shift” in his 2006 book of the same title was everywhere.
• Pension plans had all but died. Between 1983 and 2013, the percentage of Americans covered by the benefit had slid from 62% to 17%.3 Instead, employers were offering 401(k) plans for retirement savings,4 because a typical 3% match to an employee’s contribution is less expensive than the 7% to 8% of payroll it takes to fund a pension program.5 If the market doesn’t perform in this arrangement, it’s the worker, not the employer, who takes the hit. Even the 401(k) plan was mostly a perk for the wealthy: 89% of private industry workers in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ highest wage category had access to retirement benefits, compared to 32% of workers in the lowest wage category. A startling number of people—30% of the civilian population—had no retirement savings or pension.6
• Unemployment insurance had thinned at the same time as retirement benefits. In December 2014, only 23.1% of unemployed Americans received unemployment benefits from state programs—an all-time low that replaced the previous record set at 25% in September 1984.7 Federal emergency unemployment benefits, which provided extensions after state benefits ran out, expired at the end of 2013.
• And then there was health insurance, often a more immediate concern. Gig economy workers in the United States had no legal claim to the benefit at all, unless they qualified for government programs designed for the especially young, old, or poor. Among US workers who relied on sites like Mechanical Turk for their primary income, almost 40% didn’t have health insurance.8 But even employees whose employers did provide health insurance were taking on more of the cost. Between 2005 and 2015, worker contributions to employee-sponsored plans on average increased 83%.9 The average amount workers paid almost doubled, outpacing growth in workers’ earnings and overall inflation.10 Only 24% of workers in the bottom quartile of wages participated in an employer-sponsored plan.11 President Obama’s Affordable Care Act established a marketplace for buying insurance and aimed to make doing so easier for self-employed people; during the first year it was fully in place, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by 25%. But the plan was flawed in important ways, one of which was that politicians promised to dismantle rather than repair it.12
All of these trends—deteriorating retirement savings programs, weakening support for unemployed workers, and declining health benefits—have over decades compounded into unprecedented insecurity for everyone, not just those in the gig economy.
Household income in the United States became noticeably more volatile between the early 1970s and the late 2000s,13 and a Federal Reserve study published in 2014 found that a third of American households experience volatile income swings, mostly due to unpredictable hours.14 In 2004, when the Los Angeles Times reported the results of a survey that followed 5,000 families for 40 years, it concluded that “a growing number of families have found themselves caught on a financial roller coaster ride, with their annual incomes taking increasingly wild leaps and plunges.”15 The paper compared the new economy to the stock market, with an unpredictable schedule of big payouts and big setbacks for workers.
This was a theme park ride that few people enjoyed.
Labor leader David Rolf and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, writing in the journal Democracy, explained why:
Economic security is what frees us from the fear that one job loss, one illness—one economic downturn amidst a business cycle guaranteed to produce economic downturns—could cost us our home, our car, our family, and our social status. It’s what grants us permission to invest in ourselves and in our children, and to purchase the non-subsistence goods and experiences that make our lives healthier, happier, and more fulfilling. It gives us the confidence to live our lives with the realistic expectation of a more prosperous and stable economic future, and to take the entrepreneurial risks that are the lifeblood of a vibrant market economy. A secure middle class is the cause of growth, not its effect; in fact, our economy cannot reach its full potential without it. And a middle class that lives in constant fear of falling out of the middle class isn’t truly middle class at all.16
“If our captains of industry are so certain that certainty is necessary for industry,” Rolf and Hanauer concluded, citing a common argument against changing business regulations and adding new benefit programs, “then it surely must be true that their customer base, the American middle class, needs some of that certainty as well. For without the certainty that they will remain in the middle class, middle-class Americans simply cannot fulfill their crucial economic role.”
Just as the gig economy is an extreme version of the economy-wide trend away from direct employment, so too—with its total lack of safety net benefits—was it an extreme version of the increasing insecurity felt by even the directly employed portion of the middle class.
Throughout my years reporting on the gig economy, I bumped into this insecurity constantly. I found it when I interviewed Kristen Logan, who lives in Merced, California, and had with the help of Samaschool found a gig doing customer service for a beauty school in New York. She loved the gig, but said “it is scary because at any point they could decide there’s not going to be a school anymore, and then I’m back to square one.” I found it when I talked with Sarah, an Uber driver in Boston, who had rented a car to work in the gig economy and shortly later damaged it in an accident. Between car insurance payments, repair bills, and time off from driving, which was how she had planned to make money, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to recover financially. I found it in Abe’s dream of being a millionaire. Why did he care so much about becoming rich that he valued it above everything else? When I’d asked him, he had seemed confused about my curiosity.
“Are you a rich person?” he responded earnestly.
I’m not poor by any stretch, but I’m a journalist. “No,” I told him.
“There are three different realities,” he told me, with an absoluteness that made me feel like he was about to quote from a GIN teaching, which he was. “There’s the reality of poor people. The reality of middle-class people. And the reality of rich people. When you’re rich, you can do things nobody else can do. You’re truly free. If you and I lose our jobs, we’ll be done in a matter of months. For most people, it’s a matter of days.”
Few people would put it exactly like this, but the numbers actually back Abe up. According to a report from the Federal Reserve released in May 2015, 47% of Americans could not cover an unexpected $400 expense with their savings or credit card.17 There’s no cushion between those people and a total free fall.
Back in the New York deli, Senator Warner explained that he wanted to campaign for some compromise, recognizing that there would be trade-offs in any policy. “You don’t want to squash innovation with top-down policy too early,” he said, launching into what would become his stump speech. “At the same time, you don’t want people to operate on a high wire with nothing in between.” Gig economy companies had told him that, according to their surveys, what workers really wanted was more cash, not benefits.18 “I understand that,” Warner said, “but nobody wants disability until they hurt their hands and you’re a jewelry maker.”
With the support of gig economy companies like Postmates, DoorDash, and Lyft, Warner eventually sponsored a bill that, if signed into law, would fund $20 million worth of experiments around benefits better suited for non-traditional workers. “The social contract was set up on the idea of you’re going to go work for one firm for 30 years, and you’ve got all these benefits for doing that,” he told me in an interview when he announced the bill. “That’s not the case anymore. We can bemoan the fact that’s not the case forever, or we can say, let’s create a system that will work for the world today.”19
* * *
Talking about the app-based gig economy—a Silicon Valley creation that i
mpacted a minuscule percentage of the workforce—was a way to talk about big issues such as instability, insecurity, healthcare, and retirement savings. The difference was that talking about the gig economy attracted attention.
Uber, the most visible gig economy company, was one of the most exciting business stories of the decade. What had started as an idea inspired by two friends’ trouble getting a cab (on “a snowy Paris evening,” no less, according to the company’s official account), had grown within years into a global empire—an astounding feat. Uber’s cofounder and longtime CEO, Travis Kalanick, meanwhile, had an interesting story line of his own. Often portrayed as a belligerent frat boy, he seemed hell-bent on ruthlessly eliminating any obstacles to his company’s success, whether they be rivals like Lyft (whom he reportedly tried to sabotage with thousands of fake ride requests), local regulators (whom he “mowed down” in New York, as per a headline in the Washington Post), or global competition (this one didn’t work out so well, as Uber eventually ceded its China business to a formerly competitive partner). The Uber story was so entertaining that Universal and 20th Century Fox both announced Uber-themed movies during the same week (as of this writing, Universal and 20th Century Fox plan to make zero movies about retirement security).
Headlines about Uber were much more attractive than headlines about important government decisions, and Mark Warner was not the only politician who had figured this out. As the gig economy gained momentum, Democrats and Republicans alike used it as a way to frame conversations about larger, less-exciting issues.
In the first economic policy speech for her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton talked about Americans who “are making extra money renting out a spare room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car,” later adding the Democratic party line on worker classification issues—that she would “crack down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors or even steal their wages.”20