Hustle and Gig Read online

  As in the cases of many other Airbnb hosts, Amy hasn’t told her landlord about her rental activities. The need to be discreet further adds to the stress. Unable to afford the carrying costs of both homes, Amy maintains a balancing act, being attentive to the needs of her guests to ensure that they give her positive reviews and making certain that her landlord doesn’t find out about the rental.

  A recent situation with a maintenance worker highlighted the difficulties of that discretion. Amy’s landlord notified her that a worker needed access to her apartment, and she let her guests know. Unfortunately, the worker was there for several hours and repeatedly needed to be buzzed in, effectively transforming the Airbnb guests into de facto doormen for most of a workday. The guests were understandably frustrated and requested a rent reduction.

  “We were really nervous. . . . [W]e were just paranoid that they were going to write a review that was awful and give us two stars,” Amy said. “I was like, ‘Let me treat you to dinner. . . . [T]ell me where you want to go; I will call ahead.’” The guests declined her offer, noting that they would be around for only a few more nights and didn’t plan to go out. “I bought wine and chocolates and a little thing for the kid, and I’m like, ‘Well, at least enjoy your few nights home,’” she said. “We felt really responsible, but this was out of our control and we were so worried about making amends with them. [If you get] one bad review or one low star rating, it just affects everything, and then you don’t come up [in the search algorithm] and it looks like it’s not a place that’s worthwhile to stay in.”

  Maintenance worker snafus aren’t the only challenge. Needing to charge a premium for the apartment, Amy has become an on-call concierge, putting her guests in touch with local babysitters, suggesting activities for kids, and making restaurant recommendations. Like many hosts, she provides an extensive booklet of suggestions, but people often have questions or special requests that she feels obligated to fulfill. Indeed, when we met, she was just finishing an hour-plus meeting with a guest who needed additional hand-holding. Amy and her family may be mainstream Success Stories, but they’re sharing economy Strivers.

  Likewise, Ashley, a twenty-six-year-old white female, highlights how some Strivers are precariously close to Strugglers. Ashley has a full-time job, with benefits, managing local drugstores, but she still describes herself as “trying to make ends meet.” When an unemployed friend turned to TaskRabbit, the personal assistant site, and was able to set her own hourly rates, Ashley decided to do the same. “I can actually use my main job for serious expenses, and then the side jobs that I do are for my little minuscule expenses,” she said. “Major expenses would be paying rent or going on vacations or having to go to a doctor appointment or if something medically went wrong and I had to go to a hospital—anything of that kind of nature, where my main job would have to cover those finances. . . . I can use the side job for the little things, because they always add up to the big things.”

  Working two jobs is a good way to make extra money, but it’s time-consuming—and exhausting. Ashley tries to balance jobs that require extensive manual labor, such as a deep cleaning, with easier jobs like errand running. Accepting a deep-cleaning job requires an expected-energy-level calculation. “I have to think to myself: ‘Am I willing to sacrifice my exhaustion level for the pay?’ Or am I going to just say, ‘You know what? I need a day off.’ But the problem is, if I already put that availability, it wouldn’t matter how tired I am. I would have to go,” she said. “Every day, you don’t know what can happen but you have to plan—like, could you see yourself being exhausted that day regardless of what you worked? So that’s always the Catch-22. But even when there are days that I would be extremely tired, I would still make sure that I would get there. Because that person needs the help, and I’m not usually the kind of person to say, ‘Sorry, I’m too tired to come.’ I would never say that to someone. . . . So there’s a sense of professionalism involved.”

  As a result, Ashley must weigh the obligations of her full-time job with the requirements of her part-time work. “If I know that I’m staying God-knows-how-many hours in the store, I’ll make sure I take off that day so I can relax. But if it doesn’t happen that way, I would come home, sleep for two or three hours, wake up, and get myself ready to go to the client’s house,” she said. “There have been a lot of instances where I would get three clients within a day, and each one booked, from eight o’clock to twelve o’clock, twelve o’clock to four o’clock, and four o’clock to eight o’clock. Some of them do take the entire three, four, hours. Some of them only take an hour. It creates a lot of gaps in between, but it helps also for traveling, too, if I have to travel from place to place.” The time spent traveling is unpaid however, so although she may be working up to a dozen hours, Ashley is paid for only a fraction of her time.

  “At first, it was fun getting job after job after job after job. And it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m on a roll!’ But now I’m burning out, balancing that tightrope, that juggling act of trying to benefit myself in some way. But then I realized the exhaustion level started taking a toll on me. So now I have to start creating a balance. ‘Okay, if I start getting tired, I need to take a week off from TaskRabbit,’” she said. “There are just some days when I’m like, ‘I need to be away from everybody and everything and lie down, because I’m not going to be helping my main job or my side job if I’m not focused. And I won’t be helping either of them if I, God forbid, do something to myself because I’m not fully awake.’”

  Ashley and Amy illustrate the precarious nature of work in the gig economy, even for the college-educated middle class. The gig economy promises flexibility and more free time, yet workers are increasingly tethered to work because of the on-demand nature of the work. The work is seemingly flexible, but it doesn’t end. And while the workers are “self-employed” contractors and don’t answer to bosses, they remain under constant observation through a technological panopticon. But unlike Bentham’s original prison model, where prisoners cannot see the watchers and never know when they are being watched, in the gig economy everything can be collected and viewed at any point. Chat logs in TaskRabbit, emails in Airbnb, travel locations for Uber—all of this is collected and can be viewed by the platform administrators.

  There’s also a bigger social and economic issue at play here. In February 2005, President George W. Bush, after meeting with a divorced mother of three who worked three jobs, was ridiculed for describing her workload as “fantastic” and “uniquely American.” The general consensus, at the time, was that having to work multiple jobs in order to support oneself might be uniquely American, given our lack of a social safety net, but it was hardly to be applauded.

  Why have we gone from questioning why anyone should have to work multiple jobs to accepting and embracing this as our new reality? Why do workers feel the need to forgo their leisure time? Why are PhDs running errands for twenty dollars an hour, and why are former finance professionals cleaning houses?22 Why is driving part-time for Uber or renting a spare room on Airbnb seen as a postrecession solution to stagnating wages and the lack of job security? Why are workers who spend their “free” time on a technologically enabled second or third job, on a platform controlled by other people, hailed as entrepreneurs?

  Americans already work a lot. Although direct comparisons can be difficult to make owing to data gaps and different data collection methods, American work weeks are longer than in most industrialized countries.23 Even though the United States doesn’t require paid time off, and many workers don’t receive paid vacation time, research suggests that Americans neglect to take what time they do receive: on average in 2013, employees with paid time off neglected to use 3.2 days of paid time off.24 The problem seems to be growing. In The Overworked American, Juliet Schor concluded that in 1990, Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970.25 American women who work outside the home already contend with the “second shift,” the additional hours of housekeeping an
d childcare that occur on weekends and in the evenings after daytime employment.26 Men have also been increasing their levels of household work and childcare involvement, although their baseline is much lower.27

  People are not robots. Every additional hour of work must come from somewhere, leading to either reduced sleep, limited leisure, or split-attention parenting. In 2003, Robert Putnam raised an alarm, telling us that Americans were no longer “bowling together” in leagues or participating in high numbers in the types of voluntary organizations that Alexis de Tocqueville first identified as a uniquely American phenomenon. Instead, they were spending more and more time camped out in front of the television, decompressing from an ever-increasing workday.

  The sharing economy promises to bring people together, but instead it may further decrease American leisure time by providing workers with the opportunity to work more. Instead of simply reporting for a several-hour shift, workers may find themselves picking up tasks or gigs here and there, the flexibility of scheduling inadvertently increasing their workload by more than they intended. Or the proliferation of outsourcing—of hiring others to do everything from walking dogs to cleaning homes to grocery shopping and chauffeuring—may further increase the “commodification of intimate life” and lead to additional pressure to make enough to pay for market services.28

  Hiring workers off of platforms risks creating platform monopolies. As noted by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, when more and more people use a platform or tool, a “network effect” arises, which is economist speak for the idea that certain goods become more valuable as more and more people use them. The most frequently given example is that of a fax machine. If only one person has a fax machine, it’s not very useful. But as more and more people get fax machines, the tools become increasingly useful. One tool gives you access to many people. Eventually the tools are so prevalent than even spammers use them for sending scam offers. The fax machine is also an apropos example because most people no longer have, or use, fax machines. That doesn’t seem like an issue unless you’re invested in a fax machine company or are wedded to your fax, for whatever reason. When other people stop using faxes, your fax machine stops being useful.

  McAfee and Brynjolfsson note that “economics of network effects are central to understanding business success in the digital world,” and they use the example of WhatsApp to illustrate network effects. They explain that as WhatsApp became more popular, users of regular text messages (SMS) felt left out and increasingly turned to the app: “As more and more of them did this, the network effects grew stronger. Computer pioneer Mitch Kapor observed that ‘architecture is politics.’ With platforms, it’s also economics.”29

  But the idea that, for platforms, architecture can be economics might not be a good thing. As these platforms grow in size and become the “go-to spot” for everything from furniture assembly to taxis to hotel rooms, we run the risk of creating monopolies. When TaskRabbit, as part of its first pivot, transitioned into an app-based service (as opposed to remaining accessible via the website), workers who didn’t have smartphones with generous data plans found themselves at a serious disadvantage. Continuing the fax machine analogy, these workers had fax machines but everyone else was using email.

  For Strugglers, the sharing economy is an occupation of last resort. What happens to those workers if their work of last resort requires a thirty-dollar phone activation first? Do we want to live in a world where work becomes a luxury good, available only to those who can pay a marketplace entry fee or meet platform requirements? As fig. 1 shows, such a possibility has already become a reality for some workers.

  Figure 1. Union Square Park in New York City, October 2017. The young man’s sign reads, “Hired with courier co, UberEats. Can show proof. Unable to start my job without an operating phone cause I have to work off an app. Trying to raise $30 to pay 4 activating my phone. Willing to work 4 it.” Photo by author.

  SUCCESS STORIES STILL FACE INCREASED RISK

  Workers who make a comfortable living in the sharing economy—the Success Stories—are a far cry from the unemployed young man panhandling for phone activation funds. But even Success Stories face the implications of platform monopolies and an outsourcing of risk.

  Ryan, a twenty-seven-year-old white man, is a successful entrepreneur by any account. The owner of several laundromats in New York City—where most residents don’t own washer-dryers—Ryan has a high-demand business. Having previously lived in the suburbs, Ryan had one requirement when he wanted to move to New York City after college: his apartment had to be nice. So he and his business partner became roommates and rented a three-bedroom apartment for six thousand dollars a month. “We rented out one of the bedrooms, and that’s how it all started, actually,” he said, describing his entrée to Airbnb. “We ended up making about four thousand dollars a month from it, from one bedroom.”

  Impressed by the income possibilities, Ryan and his partner soon expanded their Airbnb offerings and now rent six apartments throughout New York City that they use exclusively for Airbnb hosting. Ryan’s schedule is generally open except when he gets a new apartment, then it’s “crunch time.” His goal is to have that apartment up and functioning as an Airbnb rental within a week. “It’s my whole day. Once I get into the apartment, I become very busy. We’re in New York City, with a lot of contractors that can come and mount TVs, mount shelves, and make it the best. And they put together couches and furniture if you need it. So we get it going pretty quick. What we usually do is to get the apartment, and about five days later we’ll schedule a photographer; so we know that we have five days to get everything in there. Every day it’s not on Airbnb, you are losing money.”

  And the money that can be made is significant. Ryan tries to charge at least $300 a night per property, with two-bedroom apartments renting for $300 to $400 a night, and three bedrooms billed at $450 to $650 a night. According to the website RentCafe, in 2018 a Manhattan one-bedroom apartment rents, on average, for $3,757 a month; the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $5,474.30

  Ryan is a successful Airbnb entrepreneur. And yet, he questions the promise that such entrepreneurship is readily available. First there’s the barrier to entry. Ryan knows that it takes a certain level of financial capital to take advantage of the arbitrage between the annual cost of an apartment and the price he can charge nightly on a short-term rental. “I mean, I guess not everyone can do it,” he said. “I spent the money to start these apartments up, and every apartment is twenty to thirty thousand dollars. . . . First month [rent], last month, security deposit, and sometimes a broker’s fee, furnishing the whole thing.”

  It’s a big investment and one that could easily disappear. To start with, there’s the question of legality. Using an apartment for short-term rentals of less than thirty days has been illegal since 2010, and fines from the city start at twenty-five hundred dollars per day. And Airbnb has cracked down on commercial users in the past, removing them from the platform. If Ryan were prevented from hosting, he would still be responsible for paying more than twenty thousand dollars in monthly rent for the six apartments. There are other short-term rental sites, like HomeAway, but guest reviews don’t transfer between sites, and Airbnb tends to dominate the New York market. Ryan has a fairly precarious business model.

  As a result, Ryan and his partner utilize strategies designed to skirt detection by their landlord and the city. They’ve divided their listings between their two profiles. And they are particular about the properties they rent, preferring apartments that don’t have on-site superintendents or doormen, and that feature easily replicable front-door keys as opposed to magnetic fobs. “I actually have one building on the Lower East Side where the whole building is mine,” he said. “There is a restaurant on the first floor. Another restaurant on the next floor, then an apartment and another apartment. I have both apartments, so that one is a completely secure building. That’s kind of what I look for.”

  Keeping his investment “secure�
�� also means allaying his landlord’s suspicions. Instead of calling building staff, Ryan tries to do his own repair work. “My apartments are pretty much booked, so I don’t want to ever involve my building [staff]. Unless it’s a problem where I need—like if it’s five-thousand-dollar problem, I will have [them] take care of that,” he said. “If it’s a pipe, and it costs me a few hundred bucks, I’ll take care of it just because I don’t want building [staff] to come in and, you know, whatever. I’m very cautious, basically.”

  But even beyond the legal and business concerns, Ryan remains ambivalent about his business. He’d like to see the city tax or regulate Airbnb and thereby reduce some of the uncertainty. But this would also reduce his profits.

  Perhaps most surprisingly, Ryan—a thriving entrepreneur in the sharing economy—doesn’t feel entirely comfortable telling people about what he does for a living. He prefers instead to “keep to myself.” He’s a success story who has a hard time telling the story of his success.

  RESEARCHING THE SHARING ECONOMY

  My research is based on nearly eighty ethnographic interviews with workers for Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Kitchensurfing. When I discuss my gig economy research, I often hear a response that sounds like this: “I love Uber/Airbnb/TaskRabbit! I spoke to my driver/host on the way here/when I was staying in exotic city, and they told me that the platform changed their life! Now they get to be their own boss and aren’t stuck in an office and life is fantastic!” These days, my response is equally canned: “That’s great! You may have found a really happy worker. But when your boss asks if you like your job, what do you say?”

  The sharing economy markets itself as offering a peer-to-peer connection, but that message ignores a larger reality: when you get in an Uber or hire a TaskRabbit, you become the boss, at least temporarily. You are paying them, albeit through an app that will first take a cut. You are ranking and rating their performance. Your perception and rating of their demeanor or skills may affect their ranking in the app’s algorithms and their ability to find and be hired for work. With that type of power, it’s unlikely that workers will be entirely honest about what their experience is like. Most of us have also been cautioned not to complain about our last boss to a current or prospective employer—another strong deterrent to an honest conversation.