Gigged Read online

  When Abe figured out he’d been cheated by the GIN pyramid scheme, he emailed an investigative reporter at a local television station, who then obtained complaints similar to Abe’s from the FTC and broke the story about the scam (“It was bizazro,” the reporter, Ryan Kath, confirmed). It quickly became a national story. An ABC show called The Lookout flew Abe to Chicago, where GIN was located, and picked him up from the airport in a $230,000 Bentley that had previously been driven by GIN founder Kevin Trudeau himself.19 Abe, dressed in a suit with a red checkered pocket handkerchief that matched his tie—and unbeknownst to his ABC hosts, slightly buzzed from a couple of drinks he’d downed to calm his nerves—helped them knock on the doors of the GIN office and one of Trudeau’s alleged homes, a 14,000-square-foot mansion. Unsurprisingly, nobody answered either door. Then they let him drive. “It’s got 600 horsepower, Abe,” one of the show’s anchors told him as he took the wheel, grinning.

  “That was the best day of my life,” Abe told me.

  Now feeling duped by Uber, Abe would use a similar strategy. “KC [Kansas City] UBER DRIVERS: The time has come to unite as one voice!” he wrote on his Uber Freedom Facebook page in July 2015. “We need to make a stand and unite as one and tell Uber, enough is enough! Join the organization that will ensure KC drivers are treated fairly.” Ten days earlier, he wrote, Uber had lowered rates in Atlanta by 22%, the first big cut in the short time Abe had been driving for Uber. “What is stopping them from lowering them [here]?” Abe asked.

  Around the same time, Uber deactivated Abe. The company hadn’t, according to Abe, provided an explanation, but he believed the decision was made in retaliation for his organizing activities (rather than, say, as a reaction to his habit of shotgunning rides). So he started collecting evidence for a lawsuit that would argue to the National Labor Relations Board that he and other drivers were being treated not as independent contractors, but as employees. It would be one of more than 15 such cases filed against Uber in 2015 and 2016.

  When I met with Abe in July 2016, he was enthusiastic about his claim. At a Panera Bread restaurant in Kansas City, he pulled out a clear plastic folder holding Uber’s code of conduct. “This is something you send to an employee, not an independent contractor,” he said. Then he produced another stack of papers that contained the weekly summaries of his work with the company. On the bottom of the page, each summary showed a chart of “busy hours,” with the outline of a black car placed as a marker in the grid to show the hours when he worked. “Last week you drove 6 of 16 busy hours,” read one. “You could earn up to $260 more.”

  “They’re not allowed to tell you to work, but these are insinuations that you should be working these hours,” Abe said.

  As the table between us filled with papers, Abe pointed to evidence that other drivers had sent him. Uber had told one driver to stop messaging passengers too much. Another it scolded for accepting cash payments instead of transacting through the app. A third it sent a “high cancellation warning,” meaning the driver had canceled too many trips after accepting them and was at risk of being deactivated. Someone even got a warning because they’d been inactive on the platform. It said they would be deactivated if they didn’t work again soon.

  * * *

  The various strategies companies used to direct gig economy workers may have felt to entrepreneurs like adapting a new innovation to a flawed system, but it struck many others as an old-fashioned way to avoid taxes and benefits.

  Coordinating independent workers through an app, to many labor lawyers, looked a lot like the old process of cheating workers by misclassifying them. In January 2015, workers for Instacart, a gig economy company that sent independent contractors shopping on behalf of its customers, filed a lawsuit that alleged the company’s employment practices were “unethical, oppressive and unscrupulous” (the case was subsequently settled). In March 2015, on the day after gig economy courier service Postmates announced its deal to deliver for Starbucks, its workers filed a similar class action lawsuit in California (which at the time of this writing was still ongoing). Workers for a food delivery service, Try Caviar, and the cleaning service Homejoy, did the same (Try Caviar’s case was settled). By July 2016, Uber, the gig economy poster child, was fighting more than 70 lawsuits in federal courts—including many that alleged misclassification.20

  Soon it was difficult to find any company that brokered independent workers and didn’t have a lawsuit on its hands.

  The gig economy had been born as a solution for the business problem of scaling a service business with venture capital. It had been promoted as a solution to economic woes. In 2014 and 2015, the gig economy started to look not like an innovation, but the continuation of a long change in how companies structured their workforces. Not a solution, but a problem in need of one.

  * * *

  Categories like temp worker and independent contractor put divisions between companies and workers who provide them with labor. Gig economy apps widened these divisions. Without the need to manage people face-to-face, the relationship between a brand and its workers ceased to be a human relationship at all.

  Mechanical Turk perhaps best exemplified this removal of the human interaction between employers and workers. The first “Mechanical Turk” was an eighteenth-century “automated” chess-playing contraption that, unbeknownst to its opponents, was actually manipulated by a fellow human chess player who directed each move. The modern Mechanical Turk didn’t play chess, but it did allow for a similar exaggeration of technical abilities.

  When companies could not yet accomplish some magic technology using code, they sometimes did so by automatically routing tasks to Mechanical Turk workers. Though Mechanical Turkers like Kristy had no way of knowing for sure for whom they were working, they were pretty sure that the account SergeySchmidt, a combination of the names of Google’s founder and its former CEO, which only posted tasks involving videos from Google’s video service YouTube, belonged to that company. And they were pretty sure that the JackStone account, which used a combination of the names of Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, belonged to Twitter. Task by task, the workers helped technology companies like these “automatically” identify images, moderate comments, and accomplish other impressive feats that computers could not yet effectively handle on their own.

  An entrepreneur once pitched me an app that provided nutritional information for any food based on a photo. He was very secretive about this technology that could identify the difference between an apple or a plum or a plate of spaghetti and look up the calorie content in a database. Sure enough, I found a task on Mechanical Turk that asked workers to identify the food in a photograph. That’s how the app worked: humans. But it was supposed to look like magic. And Amazon’s site so effectively created this impression that the people who hired Mechanical Turk workers sometimes forgot about their humanness altogether. As one group of researchers put it, the design of the site itself “allowed employers [to] see themselves as builders of innovative technologies, rather than employers unconcerned with working conditions.”21

  There were times when Kristy stumbled into emotionally taxing work that in a regular workplace would have come with preparation and consent. On one such occasion, she opened a task to find a slideshow of still shots taken from ISIS videos: people kneeling next to an explosive wire, preparing to die. A wicker basket full of human heads. It came with instructions similar to any other photo tagging job. Another slideshow contained photos of animal abuse so graphic that years later Kristy had trouble taking her dogs to the vet without crying.

  The only indication that something exceptionally graphic could be found inside of a task was often an “adult only” qualification. Employers used this designation on any jobs that involved user-generated content that they couldn’t control. Such jobs could pay well, and they most often didn’t contain anything disturbing. Kristy considered them worth taking. And so she accepted that psychological stress would be part of the job.

  So,
too, would physical stress. Kristy ignored a small, hard bump that developed on her wrist until it started to grow. It got a little bigger every day, until eventually it was the size of a marble and interfering with the way she held her mouse. When she finally went to the doctor, she learned that it was a ganglion cyst. He recommended surgery, but that would mean post-surgery prescriptions not covered by Canada’s state health insurance. Another traditional treatment for “Bible bumps,” as they are sometimes called, is to hit them with a heavy book. And so one day, when she couldn’t stand it anymore, Kristy gave the bump a good bashing.

  Eventually the pain went away. Then a new pain appeared, up her wrist, toward her elbow. A neurologist told her that it was carpal tunnel and a repetitive strain injury. The ideal response would have been rest. But there is no workers’ compensation in the gig economy. There is no paid sick leave in the gig economy. And among US workers who rely on sites like Mechanical Turk for their entire income, almost 40% don’t have health insurance.22 Kristy wore a wrist brace and an elbow brace and kept on clicking.

  Mechanical Turk was the only option when Kristy’s family needed money quickly. It allowed her husband to go back to high school to get his diploma. And it allowed her to earn an income from home without a college degree or a thick resume. She made it work.

  But when her husband finally landed a job, as a forklift driver at a printer company, she told him she never wanted to depend on Mechanical Turk again.

  Shortly later, she applied for university.

  * * *

  Every night after he taught his gig economy classes in Dumas, Arkansas, Terrence went home and cooked dinner for his grandmother. Then he went on a long walk and contemplated what might end the cycle of poverty in Dumas.

  From the first class he’d taught for Samasource, it had been clear to him that the gig economy alone was not the answer.

  The curriculum called for instruction on how to build an online portfolio, how to tell which Upwork jobs were scams and which were real, and how to use the platform itself. He could see how someone might reasonably believe that leveling the employment playing field meant teaching Dumas residents the ins and outs of an online job platform—Terrence even believed it at first. But he had come to more fully appreciate how drastically uneven Dumas’s patch of the playing field really was.

  Fifteen percent of adults in Dumas had never graduated high school. Terrence was trying to teach some of his students how to write an online resume profile when they hadn’t been taught to write persuasively at all. He was trying to teach them to decipher online job postings when they struggled with reading comprehension. Some Dumas residents were so unfamiliar with computers in general that they didn’t know where to type in the URL on a search browser, or how to send an email. According to a final report Samasource submitted to the Dumas program’s main backer, 60% of the students who took Terrence’s class did not own a computer, and 44% of them did not have access to the internet, even on their phones.23

  Then there were the skills that came so standard in affluent areas that people forgot they were indeed skills that needed to be taught and learned, just like any others. Most of Terrence’s students hadn’t been taught how to learn, and they hadn’t done anything academic since leaving high school. Terrence knew that applying for jobs was intimidating for anyone, but much more intimidating for people who had experienced the consistent setbacks of poverty. And it was harder still to keep applying after hearing “no” over and over and over again, which they inevitably did when they started to submit resumes on Upwork.

  Jobs on Upwork, Terrence quickly learned, tended to be either those that didn’t require any qualifications—which were won by workers in other countries willing to work for $3 or $5 per hour—or those that were extremely specialized and well remunerated, but went to workers with college and even master’s degrees. This contrast of very-low-paying work and very-high-paying work could be observed in Upwork’s decision to set a minimum wage (it decided on $3 per hour) while some of its workers wrote blog posts about making $1,000 per week using the platform.24

  Terrence knew it was true that more jobs were shifting to the gig economy. He knew that the gig economy enabled flexible jobs and could be a provider of supplemental income for people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet. But the Silicon Valley idea that the internet would be an equal opportunity employer, that anyone could turn on employment as though it were a water faucet, didn’t really work out for people living in Dumas. Rather, it had the opposite effect: It created international competition for jobs, even some local ones that the people of Dumas would have had to themselves without the internet.

  Dumas wasn’t unique in this regard. In a preliminary study, NYU Stern School of Business professor Arun Sundararajan plotted the hourly wages of workers in the San Francisco Bay Area who found jobs through the odd jobs website TaskRabbit against the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s average wage rates for the same area. He found that workers who won gigs online actually earned more than their offline peers when the job required a physical presence, such as electrical work or carpentry. His hypothesis was that because the gig economy website made it less of a hassle to find workers to complete these jobs, more people sought services, which pushed wages up. For digital-only tasks like graphic design or writing, however, wages of Bay Area gig workers were lower than those of their peers who found gigs offline. Though they lived in one of the most expensive areas in the United States, online, they were competing with workers everywhere.25

  Kristy found the same problem when she experimented with Upwork. “I found a race to the bottom,” she said. “I couldn’t compete with people living in countries where the income was lower, but the education was the same and their experience was the same.”

  I found the same problem when I tried to make it in the gig economy while reporting for a magazine story.

  “Furloughed? Try Freelancing on Fiverr,” advised a Yahoo news headline during the government shutdown of 2013.26 Fiverr was so named because, at launch, it asked workers to offer their services for a flat rate of $5 (workers now can set different rates). You could use Fiverr, the startup’s founder explained, to make money doing what you love in your spare time. Like 75% of people surveyed in a Fiverr-sponsored poll, the deal sounded pretty good to me.27 But that was before I realized that 4,786 other workers on Fiverr had, like me, offered to proofread papers for $5. My profile was nowhere to be found among the first several pages of the site’s search results for the service. To all but the most persistent of potential employers, I was invisible.

  I finally found work on TaskRabbit, where, at the time, workers could bid on odd job requests posted by their neighbors. But to get those gigs, I used advantages that Terrence’s students didn’t have. In frantic messages to prospective employers, I name-dropped my university, explained that I used to have a job helping high school kids edit their college admissions essays, and joked about how six years of experience as a swimming instructor had given me exceptional patience. As with most things, having led a privileged life was very helpful. As was being white. Researchers at Stanford University found in a study that an online posting for a physical item received 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers when the item was held by a black hand than when it was held by a white hand—and that was when selling something as simple as an iPod.28 Most of Terrence’s students were African American. Most online work platforms show employers profile photos of applicants.

  Applying for gigs on platforms like Upwork was just like applying for any job. It took a lot of effort, and it was rife with similar discrimination and sources of inequality.

  To Terrence’s students, the constant failure to get gigs was paralyzing. Spending hours applying for gigs to no avail is one thing when you’re not desperate for money and pretty sure that you have other options. All work and no pay is an entirely different experience when you can’t afford to work for free.

  Shakira Green, a 28-year-old certified nursing assis
tant, took the Samaschool class in the hope of finding a job that would allow her to work during the day, when her daughter was in school, rather than on her overnight shift. “When the class finished, I did, every day, apply for jobs and apply for jobs, but after a while of applying and not really landing any jobs, I kind of just gave up on it, to be honest,” she told me. “I think I just got frustrated, and I got tired of always writing publications, submitting proposals, and just not getting any feedback.”

  Even when Terrence helped students with their portfolios, they almost never got an interview.

  One student landed a customer service job at $7 per hour. A few tried working for $3 or $5 per hour. Someone found a $50 project, but it took so many hours to actually accomplish that the hourly pay became meaningless.

  At the end of Terrence’s first course, the feedback was consistent: This is a nice platform and all, but we’re spending a lot of time working on it without getting paid. Where are the jobs?

  Even his students who succeeded in the gig economy, like Gary, who had gotten a job taking customer service calls, still felt as though their income was precarious and their lives were insecure. Part of the problem was that the gig economy’s much-ballyhooed flexibility often seemed to apply more to the company than to the employee. Gary’s job offer letter had mandated that he work a “minimum of 30 hours per week.” But it turned out this had been a one-sided commitment. When there was enough work to do, Gary was obligated to work at least 30 hours per week. When there was not enough work to do, he might only be able to get 10 or 20 hours worth of work. He never knew when hours would be available, which meant that he couldn’t commit to another job outside of the call center.