Gigged Read online

  Saman’s first target customers were condo boards like his own. He hired his building property manager to set up meetings throughout New York, and he and the company’s first employee, a former real estate broker named Emma Schwartz (who had recently started an unrelated business selling ice cream made out of frozen bananas), took turns pitching Managed by Q at condo board meetings.

  Saman had designed a logo—a white, bold Q on a black background—and mock product shots that made it look like Managed by Q and its technology were already well established. He, Dan, and Emma presented these on an iPad, along with stock photos of smiling people who had been photoshopped into black Managed by Q uniforms.

  For $25 an hour, the entrepreneurs explained, condo boards could hire a cleaner or handyman through Managed by Q. More important, they would have access to an operating system for buildings. They could leave to-do lists, post notes for service providers, and track office supplies. Clients only had to pay for labor.

  Selling to condo boards didn’t work. Board members tolerated the pitch, but mostly wanted to wrap up the meetings so that they could have dinner with their families. As Dan put it: “Imagine pitching to people who don’t give a shit and are just being nice to you.” Only a small portion of the condo boards Managed by Q pitched actually said they would pay for the service.

  If condos wouldn’t buy it, maybe offices would. In late January, Managed by Q called every startup its founders knew and asked to speak to their office managers. Saman changed a few words in the pitch presentation. And within two weeks, about half of the 15 companies they’d pitched had purchased the service. Managed by Q, it turned out, was a service for offices—not condos.

  All that existed of Managed by Q was a landing page that could handle credit card transactions and a pdf with app design ideas. The startup had promised its new clients that it would start cleaning their offices in April. Now it had just six weeks to both build the technology from scratch and figure out how to clean office buildings. Though the “future of work” would eventually become an important part of the Managed by Q story, Saman, Emma, and Dan didn’t think about the gig economy or how work was evolving as they scrambled to launch the startup. They just needed to find cleaners—and quickly.

  As engineers worked on the software, Emma, who at the time was in charge of operations, reached out to the companies that might provide office cleaners. The janitorial industry had been early to join the gig economy, though it didn’t think of it that way. By the year 2000, 40% of janitors in the United States worked not for the companies whose offices they cleaned, but for janitorial companies, which typically charge clients a fee on top of their employees’ wages.2 Managed by Q, a contractor itself, would make the companies it partnered with contractors to contractors. That meant another layer of people taking a cut from the cleaners’ work, and another layer between the people who owned the offices in which they worked and the people employing them.

  Emma cold-called every cleaning company she could find in New York, offering an opportunity to work with what she assured them would soon be a hot new startup. Eventually two companies located in Long Island agreed to provide cleaners.

  Managed by Q’s founders sought to convey their company values to their newly subcontracted cleaners at a presentation on “how Q cleans.” Of course, they weren’t yet up to speed on the realities of squeegeeing windows and cleaning toilets. While they had mixed their own non-toxic cleaning supplies (Dan’s brother was a chemist) and done some research about how to brand their service, the founders didn’t have any real experience doing actual cleaning. Instead, they had an idea about how to make their service stand out.

  The theory was inspired by the hotel industry. For the most part, it went, office workers, like hotel guests, only notice cleaners if something goes wrong: an un-emptied trash can, or an ominous-looking stain on their sheets. But hotels have figured out that they can create positive feelings among their guests by leaving noticeable signs that a room has been cleaned, like a turned-down bed or chocolates on a pillow. Managed by Q would do the same. The iPads Managed by Q planned to install on the wall of each customer’s office would be one reminder that it existed. The startup would also leave branded Managed by Q water bottles on every desk after the first cleaning and, in direct imitation of hotels, fold the end of every toilet paper roll into a perfect triangle.

  At an orientation session, Emma and Saman explained all of this to their newly subcontracted cleaners, who had arranged themselves around a big table in a borrowed conference room. They demonstrated the Managed by Q iPad app, explaining that their customers would be leaving feedback on the cleaner’s work. “The office looks great!” read one example review (in this hypothetical best-case scenario, none of the clients used the feedback button to complain). Then Managed by Q’s founders took head shots of each of the cleaners, which would be displayed on the iPad app, handed out black zip-up track jackets and T-shirts—each branded with a white “Q” that matched the water bottles—and hoped for the best.

  In Silicon Valley, other “Uber for X” entrepreneurs were solving the service portion of their businesses in a similar way. Though some hired subcontractors, like Managed by Q, and some hired independent contractors, like Uber, the misconception behind both strategies was similar: “We’d build this beautiful interface, and of course the cleaning just happens,” Saman remembered thinking. “Of course the stuff just gets done.”

  PART II

  SUNSHINE, RAINBOWS, AND UNICORNS

  CHAPTER 5

  LIKE AN ATM IN YOUR POCKET

  The percentage of adults who earned some income through websites like Uber, Airbnb, and Mechanical Turk grew 47-fold between 2012 and 2015, expanding to include around 4% of adults in the United States.1 As the gig economy gained traction, Silicon Valley was sure that it would change the world. And it was equally sure, or at least seemed hell-bent on convincing itself, that the change would be wonderful.

  This was typical of the tech industry, which tended to frame everything in terms of its world-changing positive social impact, sometimes to an unintentionally hilarious effect. (“Every day, in every way, the things that matter to our lives are coming to us,” began one pitch for an on-demand fuel startup called WeFuel. “But there’s something that still forces us to get in our car, fight traffic, and go through a ritual that is more than 100 years old. Filling up our cars with gas.” The horror!)

  Certainly most entrepreneurs in the gig economy didn’t know much about the lives of low-wage workers, but the difference between getting attention from the tech press, which could help raise money, and remaining unknown was often a matter of telling the right story. This was before companies like Facebook came under scrutiny for their impact on mental health, privacy, elections, and housing prices in San Francisco, and grand pronouncements about tech as a driving force for good didn’t feel as tone deaf as they might today.

  Uber was, according to a 2014 press release along these lines, creating a powerful technology that “delivers turnkey entrepreneurship to drivers across the country and around the world.” Explained Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: “For the first time, I think in possibly history, work is flexible to life and not the other way around.”2 He later stretched the talking point even further, suggesting on stage at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit that Uber itself was a social insurance of sorts. “In many ways, we look at Uber as the safety net for a city,” he said, before asking the audience to imagine that a factory had closed down. What would happen to those workers? “They can push a button and get to work.”3

  This particular point became a go-to for gig economy entrepreneurs, who repeated themselves like pull-string toys that had been pre-programmed with only a handful of phrases.

  “People are increasingly building flexible careers on their own terms, based on their passions, desired lifestyle and access to a much broader pool of opportunities than ever before in history,” Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork, the largest freelance marketplace, comm
ented in a 2015 press release.4 Oisin Hanrahan, the CEO of Handy, a gig economy cleaning service, wrote in an editorial for Wired magazine that same year that “service providers have … signed up in droves because it provides income opportunities and flexible arrangements that may not have been available otherwise.”5 When I asked Stan Chia, Grubhub’s COO, what the business case was for classifying the company’s couriers as contractors, instead of answering the question, he said, “It affords the courier base the flexibility they want.” Carole Woodhead, the CEO of Hermes UK, one of Britain’s largest delivery companies, when responding to a claim that people only worked for the company because they were desperate, said that its workers “do not want to be employed,” because they “like the flexibility … They like the ability to choose—the number of rounds they do, the number of hours they work.”6 No matter what the criticism or inquiry, if it involved the gig economy, you could reliably expect that the response would focus on flexibility.

  These executives were right that the 9-to-5 job had become increasingly unrealistic for workers. Our collective idea that a “job” means working five days each week, every week, all year long came from a time when the ideal family included a male breadwinner and a female house worker. That setup was never really the case for a large percentage of American households, and it is even less common today, when more than 70% of mothers work for pay and women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of US households.7

  The 9-to-5 job doesn’t make much sense at a time when most families don’t include a full-time, unpaid worker at home. It means that households often have to split three jobs—two out-of-home jobs and one at-home job—between two people, or, in the case of a single-parent household, one person has to take on two jobs. This puts an incredible amount of stress on workers (and especially women, who still shoulder a disproportionate amount of housework).8 But instead of responding to this stressful situation with more flexibility or shorter hours, jobs have largely become more intense. A 1999 report from the UN International Labour Office detailed that the number of hours Americans worked rose throughout the 1990s. It concluded that they worked more hours than any other industrialized nation, including Japan, which has such a notorious overwork culture that the government has considered legally requiring workers to take five days of their vacation time every year.9

  Outside of parenting, full-time jobs all but preclude the possibility of passion projects, volunteer work, or additional education, which is increasingly important as relevant skills evolve with technology. And, quite simply, people don’t like their jobs. Annual Gallup polls between 2011 and 2015 have reported that around 70% of US workers say they are not engaged in their work.10 The gig economy’s flexibility was, from this perspective, undeniably appealing.

  As the gig economy kicked off in 2013, it also looked like a potential solution for another pressing problem, which was that, even as many workers were struggling to juggle intense jobs with other responsibilities, a significant portion of the population was having trouble finding a job at all. Unemployment had fallen from its high of 10% in October 2009, but it still hovered at 6.6% in January 2014.11 US inequality was the highest it had been since 1923.12

  The press spent a lot of time covering how the gig economy might help, with their reactions to the idea that it could end unemployment ranging between “cautious but enthusiastic” to full-out, drink–the–Kool-Aid excited. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, among the latter camp, held that “these entrepreneurs are not the only answer for our economic woes … but they are surely part of the answer.” A Forbes cover story in 2013 explained that the sharing economy and gig economy had created “an economic revolution that is quietly turning millions of people into part-time entrepreneurs.”13

  Tech journalists and bloggers, perhaps having spent too much time immersed in the optimism of entrepreneurs, typically went for full-out hype. “Will You Leave Your Job to Join the Sharing Economy?” prompted the tech blog VentureBeat in a 2013 headline.14 The article’s author had met a Lyft driver who also worked for TaskRabbit, a website on which neighbors could hire each other to complete odd jobs. She had also posted her apartment on the peer-to-peer lodging website Airbnb. “The combination of these three things is making her more money than she made working full time,” the article’s author gushed. “Plus, she feels like she’s working for herself without the risk of starting her own company.” The conclusion was in sync with Silicon Valley’s vision: “I have a feeling 2013 is going to be a year where we start to hear about people leaving full-time employment to do a combination of different shared services so they can have a more flexible schedule.”

  It wasn’t too far of a jump to extend this success story into a vision for the future of work, especially as on-demand apps launched for specific professionals like programmers, lawyers, interior designers, and even doctors.

  “Uber, and more broadly the app-driven labor market it represents, is at the center of what could be a sea change in work, and in how people think about their jobs,” New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote in January 2015. “You may not be contemplating becoming an Uber driver any time soon, but the Uberization of work may soon be coming to your chosen profession.”15 He continued: “Just as Uber is doing for taxis, new technologies have the potential to chop up a broad array of traditional jobs into discrete tasks that can be assigned to people just when they’re needed, with wages set by a dynamic measurement of supply and demand, and every worker’s performance constantly tracked, reviewed and subject to the sometimes harsh light of customer satisfaction.”

  Online freelancing itself wasn’t exactly a revolution. Two of the first websites for hiring freelancers had been founded more than a decade prior, in 1999 and 2003. (Those websites had combined to form Upwork in 2013.) But the proliferation of “Uber for X” demonstrated how new technology could be used to manage workers as well as coordinate work among them. Even traditional websites like Upwork soon began mimicking the on-demand nature of these sites, with features that routed jobs to the right workers rather than asking employers to wait for responses to a job posting. “We’re trying to move toward an on-demand model,” Shane Kinder, Upwork’s vice president of product, told me in an interview. “We’d love to be in the world where we enter information and instantly get back a freelancer who is qualified to do the job and is ready to do it now.”

  Startups that offered specific types of work, like Gigster, had already set that dynamic up, often by thoroughly screening the freelancers they worked with in advance. One company, called Konsus, offered a “full e-commerce experience” for such business services as creating PowerPoint presentations. Its clients could purchase graphic design work for $29 per hour, or research work for $35 per hour, by clicking “get started now.” Konsus then found an appropriate freelancer and delivered the project.

  Academia stretched the concept of on-demand workers even further. A researcher at Stanford who studies “gig work” built a computer program that automatically managed complex projects.16 When one step was completed, the system automatically hired a freelancer for the next step, on-boarded him or her, and handed off the project. One of the trial teams successfully turned napkin sketches for new apps into functional prototypes—and recruited users to test them—all within a single day.

  Another group of researchers at a nonprofit research center called the Institute for the Future created a project called “iCEO” that similarly automated the coordination of freelance work. For one task, they programmed the software to prepare a 124-page research report for a Fortune 50 company. By automatically coordinating work by writers, editors, proofreaders, and fact-checkers on various online platforms, it completed the report, which would have usually taken weeks, in three days.17 The researchers didn’t even really have to manage the project. Quality checks and HR processes were also freelance assignments. In one meta-example, a contractor hired through a website called oDesk completed the task “hire oDesk contractors.”

  It was bec
oming easier and easier to imagine a point at which any type of work—no matter how complicated or how dependent on the work of a team—could be ordered with the click of an app. The 9-to-5 job, as a concept, could disappear altogether.

  Gig economy startup valuations soared as quickly as these expectations. In the six months between June and December 2014, Uber more than doubled its paper value to investors, jumping from a $17 billion valuation (an amount the New York Times called “eye-popping”18) to a $40 billion valuation.19 It was only a matter of time before the gig economy was expected to create more “unicorns,” the tech world’s nickname for startups with valuations higher than $1 billion.

  Though it was still early days for the majority of gig economy companies, some had passed promising milestones. Postmates, a courier delivery service, had by 2014 expanded from a one-person startup to a more than 20-city operation, and it would soon win partnerships with giant, established brands like Starbucks and McDonald’s. Grocery delivery company Instacart in 2014 said it was on track to generate $100 million in revenue, ten times the amount it had earned during the previous year. Handy expanded to 28 cities and signed up 5,000 cleaners. When the company passed $1 million in revenue in a single week, TechCrunch turned the milestone into a story: “Our cleaners say,” Handy’s CEO told the blog, that “it’s like an ATM machine in your pocket.”20