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  Hustle and Gig

  Hustle and Gig

  STRUGGLING AND SURVIVING IN THE SHARING ECONOMY

  Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2019 by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ravenelle, Alexandrea J., 1980– author.

  Title: Hustle and gig : struggling and surviving in the sharing economy / Alexandrea J. Ravenelle.

  Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018033918 (print) | LCCN 2018038179 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520971899 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520300552 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520300569 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Precarious employment. | Independent contractors. | Employee rights. | Flexible work arrangements—United States. | Labor—United States. | Labor market—United States.

  Classification: LCC HD5857 (ebook) | LCC HD5857 .R38 2019 (print) | DDC 331.25/96—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033918

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Anna

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  1. Strugglers, Strivers, and Success Stories

  2. What Is the Sharing Economy?

  3. Forward to the Past and the Early Industrial Age

  4. Workplace Troubles

  5. Sharing Is Caring

  6. All in a Day’s (Dirty) Work

  7. Living the Dream?

  8. Conclusion

  Appendix 1. Demographic Survey

  Appendix 2. Interview Matrix

  Notes

  References

  Index

  Illustrations

  FIGURES

  1. Young man with sign

  2. The sharing economy and related forms of the platform economy

  3. Lockboxes for Airbnb rentals attached to tree guards in the East Village

  4. Lockboxes for Airbnb rentals attached to fence railings in the East Village

  5. Screenshot of Airbnb opening page

  6. Screenshot of Airbnb income potential in New York City

  7. Uber advertisement on the back of a bus in New York City

  8. Protest organized by Uber in response to proposed limits on for-hire vehicles

  9. Screenshot of Uber’s client-focused webpage

  10. “Uber needs partners like you”

  11. Jamal’s feet after he cleaned a fish pond in Brooklyn

  12. TaskRabbit advertising campaign noting, “We do chores. You live life.”

  13. Screenshot of app screens from Pooper media materials

  14. Uber drivers attending a counterprotest to raise awareness of their 1099 status

  MAP

  1. The East Village, bordered by East Fourteenth Street, East Houston Street, Fourth Avenue, and the East River

  TABLES

  1. Skill and Capital Barriers to Sharing Economy Work

  2. UberX Rates in New York City, 2014 to 2018

  BOX

  1. Twenty Factors in Determining Whether an Employer-Employee Relationship Exists

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I owe a debt of gratitude to the workers who took time out of their days—in lives where time truly is money—to talk to me about the experience of working in the gig economy. Without their honesty and openness, this would have been a very different project.

  I started my career in journalism and nonprofits, and my journey to researching the sharing economy was a multistep process with numerous mentors, colleagues, and loved ones providing support and advice along the way.

  I finished this manuscript while working as a visiting instructor at Mercy College in New York, where Karol Dean, Diana Juettner, and Dorothy Balancio offered their tireless encouragement and support. My students and colleagues at Mercy have been especially gracious and eager to help, regularly forwarding me articles about the gig economy and inquiring about the status of my research.

  My editor, Naomi Schneider, showed early interest in this project, when it was just a one-page proposal, and has provided valuable feedback and advocacy. Her editorial assistant, Benjy Malings, has been exceptionally patient with the numerous questions associated with a first-time author. The production team—Jessica Moll and Bonita Hurd—have been the epitome of patience. Thank you to P.J. Heim for building the index.

  As a graduate student at the University of Missouri, I was assigned Barbara Katz Rothman’s essay “Now You Can Choose! Issues in Parenting and Procreation” in one of my classes. Amid my orange highlights, I scrawled “good writer” in the margins, with a notation to revisit how she brought stories into her argument. A decade later, I found myself in Barbara’s food studies course at the City University of New York Graduate Center and eventually became her advisee in matters both academic and personal. I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have connected with such a talented and thoughtful writer and mentor.

  Philip Kasinitz, the executive officer of the Graduate Center sociology program during most of my tenure, was also generous with his time, humoring my occasional office drop-ins with hour-long conversations on everything from article topics to job applications—even making time to meet with me while traveling internationally. Paul Attewell provided additional advice on theory and writing, and Vilna Bashi Treitler provided me with a crash course in matrix interviewing, courtesy of Learning from Strangers, that made it possible for me to collect these stories.

  John Torpey and Samson Frankel took a chance on my academic aspirations when these aspirations amounted to little more than optimism. John was especially gracious with his time, reading funding proposals and providing the feedback and reassurance that I so desperately needed at times, while Samson’s encouragement was a decisive step in my return to graduate school.

  Juliet Schor shared her transcription resources and offered professional guidance early in my academic career, serving as a crucial resource and a welcome addition as a mentor. Wayne Brekhus, in his first semesters as an assistant professor, showed me how to bring research into the classroom and inspired my own categorization of workers. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jennifer Silva and Tamara Mose for their valuable suggestions for strengthening the manuscript, and to David Brady for skilled mentoring.

  I have also benefited greatly from mentoring by former Graduate Center colleagues. Jonathan Davis and Alexandre Frenette provided feedback and advice on proposal and article writing and generously shared their own work, while fellow cohort members Sarah D’Andrea and Rachel Bogan were a source of equally important commiseration.

  While at the CUNY Graduate Center, my work was supported by an Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Entre-preneurship, an Early Research Initiative Award in Interdisciplinary Research in the Service of Public Knowledge, a Dissertation Year Award, and a Doctoral Student Research Grant. I remain grateful to the Kauffman Foundation for providing ongoing support and networking opportunities, and to the Graduate Center’s sociol
ogy department, including Rati Kashyap and Lynn Chancer, for their backing.

  Research can be myopia inducing, and I thank the family and friends who have provided support, reassurance, and encouragement. Dena Kessler, Joel Rosner, Digs Majumder, Isaiah Akin, Chani Kavka, Jonathan Weinberg, and Jamie Moore served as sounding boards and offered invaluable friendship. Brian Kennedy and Alex Palmer, members of my writing group, were a source of competitive encouragement.

  My mother was an early advocate of my writing career, battling rush-hour traffic to bring me to newspaper meetings and supporting my entrepreneurial efforts. My aunt Diane Lefebvre challenged me to publish my work and has never stopped believing in me. Both Diane and my mother-in-law, Eva Duncan, gave the ultimate gift of their time, generously cooking meals, helping with childcare, and offering their support and understanding when I was overwhelmed with deadlines. My brother Chuck shared his own experiences in the gig economy world and was an upbeat cheerleader.

  My husband, Sam Duncan, kept me fed, the dog walked, and the baby sleeping, and prevented the ever-present dishes on my desk from turning into a moldy avalanche. I love you and appreciate all that you do. Thank you.

  This book is dedicated to Anna Addison, who inspired me to write multiple chapters in a summer and was the perfect “dissertation baby,” happy to watch me write and even happier to play with my discarded drafts. May you always achieve your dreams.

  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.’”