For the past few years, we have been inundated with think pieces about the gig economy. They feature vignettes of Americans working flexible hours to pick up extra cash: the graduate student who drives for Uber in his spare time, the stay-a-home parent who brings in extra spending money with EasyShift, the high school student picking up odd jobs on TaskRabbit. Whether it is being praised as the newest innovation in work-life balance or a massive new industry that will displace traditional work relationships, we live in a period that touts the “gig economy” as the latest great phase of modern work.
If this were actually true, I would praise the dawn of a new era too—especially one where, for once, more people could have access to equal parts work, rest, and recreation. But this trend is actually just a collection of familiar, exploitative business practices re-packaged as a positive 21st century development.
Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox
Gig executives are using the hipness of company brands to mask age-old practices. Companies lure workers by projecting their apps as the new, fast way to achieve the American dream of being your own boss. And at first glimpse, the gigs may seem that way. As Guardian columnist Arun Sundararajan wrote last year, “this explosion of small-scale entrepreneurship” looks like Adam Smith’s capitalist ideal of “a genuine market economy of individuals engaging in commerce with one another.” The problem is that these self-employed entrepreneurs have very little autonomy. They aren’t setting their prices, outlining the scope of their development, or even determining what car to drive—the company still maintains control over those decisions.
There’s only one situation in which gig companies are willing to cede control to individual workers: when something goes wrong, and someone needs to be held accountable. In those cases, gig companies try to minimize their relationship with their workers. This is particularly clear in two recent lawsuits against Uber. In the first case, two women attempted to hold Uber accountable for the sexual harassment they experienced from a driver. The company claimed the driver was an independent contractor—not an employee—and thus they weren’t liable. In the second case, workers sued the company for mileage and tip reimbursements that they currently have to cover themselves. Again, the company argued that the workers aren’t employees—and that making them employees would undermine their business model by damaging driver flexibility and adding too many costs. So far, judges in both cases have decided against Uber (in the first case by allowing the lawsuit to proceed, and in the second by rejecting a proposed settlement that the judge felt was “not fair, adequate, and reasonable” for the drivers).
Classifying workers as independent contractors is key to many gig companies’ strategies, since gig workers are paid the same (or less) than formal employees and receive significantly fewer benefits such as health care, paid sick leave, or workers’ compensation for injuries. And at the end of the day, gig companies’ goals are the same as always: to keep their costs low while maximizing profits.
To be clear, I am not against the gig economy or the tech innovations that have made it possible. The issue is that the gig economy is sold to workers as a type of empowerment, but the actual jobs are designed to hold them back. Flexibility for workers does not automatically gel with the on-demand needs of company executives. Both parties need room to negotiate—which is most effective when workers are able to unionize.
Unsurprisingly, gig execs militantly combat workers who attempt to form unions. Again, Uber is an illustrative example: when Seattle granted its drivers the right to unionize, the company instructed its customer service reps to call through a list of drivers to explain why unionizing was a bad idea (a spokeswoman defended the practice in a statement, saying “it’s not clear a traditional union can serve such a large and varied group of people.”) The company also has a history of “de-activating” drivers who lead unionizing efforts (and its major competitor, Lyft, has been accused of similar tactics, though spokespeople for the companies have denied the allegations). NYU professor Aswath Damodaran explained that unions will ultimately hurt companies’ bottom lines, saying “they are likely to shake up the current revenue-sharing balance.” In other words, union workers get more of the total share, and that makes the execs nervous. And so it pays to keep gig workers from organizing.
So while the inevitability of the “gig economy” is upon us, it is far from the worker-powered revolution that companies are marketing. But workers at many gig companies are experimenting with different ways to negotiate over their conditions, from Seattle to New York and overseas. They are proving that the only thing inevitable about the gig economy is that, as with business innovations of the past, working people will eventually figure out how to organize. And frankly, it would save us all a lot of time if gig companies simply came to the table.
This article is based on a presentation given at the American Sociology Association national conference in Seattle 2016.