My interviews with Kitchensurfing chefs occurred between March and November 2015, in the midst of the service pivot and multiple other changes. In September 2015, the service announced that on-demand workers would switch from being independent contractors (1099 workers) to being employees. Workers, who had previously been paid sixty dollars for a shift of up to four hours, had their pay changed to fifteen dollars an hour. And although they were to become eligible for health insurance, there was a lack of clarity about when this would happen or the policies related to it. The Secret Diner program, which allowed workers to earn two-hundred-dollar bonuses for meeting service expectations, was also discontinued. Then in April 2016, the service closed its doors.
I recruited participants from both branches of Kitchensurfing. Several marketplace workers also had experience working for the Tonight service, having been tapped by Kitchensurfing to fill service gaps. Participants were split between those who were primarily marketplace chefs and those mostly affiliated with the on-demand service. Five of the interviews with Kitchensurfing marketplace chefs occurred as the service was closing down or soon after it was shuttered.
Study participants were generally diverse, with 58 percent identifying as white, 26 percent as black/African American, and 11 percent as Hispanic. One participant declined to answer. Sixty-eight percent of participants were male, and 32 percent were female. Their ages ranged from twenty to fifty-six, with 58 percent falling between twenty and thirty-five years of age. The education levels of my Kitchensurfing respondents were especially varied. A third of participants mentioned having earned either a bachelor of arts degree or a bachelor of science degree, while three listed a graduate degree and three noted that they had “some college.” Two had high school diplomas, two had associate degrees, and one had “some graduate school.” Two declined to give an education level. The majority of my sample described their household incomes as below $50,000, while six listed incomes between $50,000 and $74,999, three had incomes between $75,000 and $99,999, and three reported incomes above $100,000.
The sharing economy is often hyped as a solution to many societal ills: inflexible work policies, a lack of social connection, a growing trend of inequality, and even a faulty social safety net. An examination of the lived experiences of workers illustrates the dangers that result from the gig economy’s shifting of risk and liability, and it highlights the downgrading of the value of labor in the United States. As the next chapter will demonstrate, rather supplying a solution to modern societal troubles, gig work subjects workers to a technologically enabled early-industrial system with limited workplace-safety measures or options for redress.
3
Forward to the Past and the Early Industrial Age
Donald, a fifty-five-year-old white male, is a perfect example of a Struggler. A finance professional for more than twenty years, he was “eliminated” in early 2008, on the cusp of the Great Recession. “I went up to HR [human resources] for a meeting and I was out the door. I never even got to go downstairs to say good-bye to my coworkers,” he said. “Everything went south, and I have not been able to find full-time work since. . . . I’ve had various jobs. Six months at [a major bank], nine months at [an educational nonprofit], six months at [an insurance company]. I worked for about four months for an interior decorator who didn’t pay me. So, you know, I have been trying. . . . I did some work on an eBay business. I was selling on eBay for some people. I’m trying to find things.”
Our conversation took place in Union Square, a park on East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. A tall man with a ruddy complexion, Donald showed his anxiety in his fingers, which were dotted with rusty red scabs from his worrying over hangnails and his habit of picking at calluses.
In order to make ends meet, Donald was in the process of emptying his individual retirement account, paying a 10 percent early-withdrawal penalty in addition to having the funds taxed as income. When he found TaskRabbit, Donald thought he had found a way to staunch the financial hemorrhage. “I wish I knew about TaskRabbit sooner. I just heard about that three months ago,” he said, explaining that it took two months to be accepted by the platform. “If I’d known about it seven years ago, maybe I wouldn’t be in the situation I am now, desperate for money.”
TaskRabbit wasn’t just a source of much-needed funds. “When it’s dark out [in the winter], it’s harder to get out of bed. That’s one thing I liked about TaskRabbit. It was getting me out of bed,” he said. “You’ve really got to be available in case somebody contacts you. So it was getting me up, getting me out. There were days in the winter where you just stayed in bed. You know, darkness, depression. It gets serious, and I’m not usually a depressed person.”
Most sharing economy workers are relatively young—recent college graduates who are paying off student loans or supplementing starter salaries. MacArthur Foundation–funded research on the sharing economy has focused almost entirely on young people between the ages of 18 and 34 in part because they tended to be early adopters.1 However, roughly a quarter of the sharing economy workers that I interviewed were adults in their forties, fifties, and even sixties. In my research, I’ve found that these older adults are more likely to be Strugglers than Success Stories or Strivers. Especially in terms of TaskRabbit work and Uber driving, the sharing economy is an occupation of last resort owing to age discrimination and the reluctance of employers to hire the long-term unemployed.
For Donald, his TaskRabbit work as a Struggler often meant taking on menial tasks such as cleaning and errand running, tasks that may have led to his end as a Tasker. The night before our interview, he emailed me to say, “I am not sure if you still want to meet with me. I received an email tonight from TaskRabbit stating that I have been removed from the Task Rabbit community. The reason is ‘unprofessional conduct and behavior.’ I do not know what this pertains to and cannot get any answers from them until next week. I have no idea what they are talking about. I have not been able to respond to the (for [lack] of a better word) charges against me.”
In our interview the next day, Donald puzzled over what could qualify as “unprofessional conduct and behavior.” Maybe a client complained that his cleaning took too long or that quality was lacking? Or maybe it was a client who had asked about paying him outside the platform, a violation of the TaskRabbit terms of service.2 When we met, he read me his email from TaskRabbit:
You have violated the following TaskRabbit policy: “Don’t display unprofessional or unbecoming communication or behavior in any form. . . .” Due to this we have removed you from the TaskRabbit community. Please do not continue to contact clients or continue with any of your scheduled tasks. If you have started work on any tasks that have not been completed, please let us know immediately. Make sure that all payments owed to you from your account balance will be paid on the next cycle. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this email, the TaskRabbit policy team is available via email and by phone, appointment only.
He had emailed back immediately to ask for the first available meeting and to learn more about the claims against him. But several days after, he was still waiting for a response.
For many workers, human resource departments are a bureaucratic annoyance—mandatory commonsense training sessions on sexual harassment, never-ending paperwork, and the creation of workplace policies that are at best annoying. But for workers in the sharing economy, a human resources office with an open-door policy feels like a luxury.
Workers for many sharing economy services report that it is difficult to contact a person when they have issues. Uber is notorious for providing only an email address for drivers and clients alike. Airbnb’s email-only policy led to a public relations disaster with the first reported instance of a ransacked apartment, and its subsequent twenty-four-hour helpline was less than helpful in the case of a guest being held prisoner in Madrid.3 For TaskRabbit, most issues raised by Taskers have been handled via online service requests and emails, with sometimes weekslong delays in getting a
response. The website also offers an emergency assistance phone number; but whereas Taskers can be on call from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, the service line has reduced hours: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST on weekdays, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. PST on weekends and holidays. The reduced service hours on weekends and holidays is especially ironic, given that TaskRabbit offered incentives such as cash bonuses or iPad contests to encourage workers to accept holiday weekend tasks.
Contacting the customer service hotline took on added importance for Donald because of his financial situation. He needed money and he needed work. “I’m very annoyed about the way it was done, that I’ve got no recourse whatsoever. I’m guilty until proven innocent. I was never asked, I was never . . . Like I said, I’ve never been told what I did. So yeah, I think it’s atrocious the way they treated me, and if I can find something else to do I will. Right now I don’t [have anything else], so I need them.”
Donald was hoping to be reinstated. But in case that didn’t happen, he had already begun looking at TaskRabbit competitors, such as Thumbtack, and at other sharing economy services, such as Kitchensurfing.
TaskRabbit and other sharing economy services claim to be changing the world of work. But rather than freeing workers from the tyranny of bosses, the time-suck of mandatory hours, and even the rigidity of a preset paycheck, sharing economy services often promise a different reality than they deliver. Although many of these services present the “entrepreneurial ethos” and market themselves as bringing entrepreneurialism to the masses, a quick historical review of labor shows that for all its focus on technology, the sharing economy is truly a throwback to an earlier age.
THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN LABOR
In many ways, the history of the United States is the history of the labor movement. Even before the American Revolution, there were small strikes among New York City cartmen, in 1677, and bakers, in 1741.4 Yet, while the United States was still in its infancy as a colony of Great Britain, labor unrest remained short-lived and isolated. Seeking the “pursuit of happiness” through higher pay and shorter hours, New York printers went on strike in 1794, cabinet makers in 1796, Philadelphia carpenters in 1797, and shoemakers in 1799.5
In the early 1800s, when workers tried to use collective bargaining power to obtain increased wages, decreased hours, or just generally improved conditions, they faced the threat of indictment and prosecution for criminal conspiracy. Although the United States did not have specific laws against worker organizing, early American courts followed British common law: when two or more workers plotted the harm of a third, or of the public, they could be indicted on a charge of criminal conspiracy. As a result, two workers could not unite to negotiate with an employer to win concessions that they were unable to earn on their own. In one case from 1805, eight Philadelphian shoemakers were indicted on charges of conspiring to raise wages. The defendants’ lawyer argued that the employers were hiding behind the 1349 English Statute of Laborers, which required all able-bodied workers who survived the black plague to work for state-fixed wages in the interest of employers.6 The shoemakers lost and were fined eight dollars each.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, workers in at least twenty-three cases were indicted and generally convicted for criminal conspiracy in Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.7 Most were found guilty but were given relatively small fines as a “testimonial to the temper of the people,” even as the guilty findings demonstrated an intention to “drive unionism out of American life.”8 However, workers continued to organize, and by 1810—less than twenty years after the first trade union was established in America—some unions had already established collective bargaining; minimum wage demands; a “closed,” or union, shop; unity between skilled and unskilled workers; and solidarity between different unions.9
The economic depression of 1819–1822 destroyed those unions that had managed to survive strikes and conspiracy charges, but the mid- to late 1820s heralded a resurgence of worker organizing. In 1825, Boston carpenters struck for a ten-hour workday, only to be told that the shortened workday was bad for workers, would “exert a very unhappy influence,” and expose workers to “many improvident temptations and improvident practices.”10 By 1829, New York City workers had secured recognition of the ten-hour workday, although employers continued to attempt to reinstate an eleven-hour day. In the four years from 1833 to 1837, there were 168 strikes in the country as a whole, with the majority focused on two issues: 103 of the strikes were for higher wages, and 26 were for a ten-hour workday. By 1835, a day’s work was ten hours for skilled mechanics in most cities.11 However, for factory workers, hours remained long. In 1835, children working in textile mills in Paterson, New Jersey, struck for the reduction of their working day to eleven hours for five days a week and nine hours on Saturdays. Although mill owners didn’t meet their demands entirely, they did reduce the work week to just sixty-nine hours (a daily reduction ranging from ninety minutes to two hours).12
Before the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain began, in 1760, most of the workers considered “unskilled” were those in agriculture or the piecemeal system, quaintly referred to as the “cottage industry,” in which work was outsourced to be completed at home. Also known as the “putting-out” or “giving-out” system, such work drew on both artisanal and domestic arrangements. Merchants and village storekeepers distributed raw materials to women, who used them to produce goods that the entrepreneurs then sold. Women were given flax and wool to spin into yarn, which was then woven into cloth and stockings or used in shirts and gloves; straw to be braided into hats; and stockings to seam and shoes to bind. This early work-at-home arrangement was seen as a panacea for poor women, and from 1734 through the War of 1812, charitable benefactors gave needy women spinning wheels as the solution to their financial difficulties.13
The enclosure movement in Great Britain—in which land that had been farmed by tenant farmers was enclosed by fences and used for grazing sheep—along with the consolidation of farmlands, displaced large portions of the population in England. Former tenant farmers flocked to the cities, providing a source of labor for the fledgling factories. In 1781, Richard Arkwright established the world’s first steam-driven textile mill in Manchester, England, and within a hundred years the area became the largest and most productive cotton-spinning center in the world, producing nearly a third of global cotton goods.14
English law prohibited the emigration of skilled textile workers; but in 1793, Samuel Slater, a former British textile apprentice, founded the Slater Mill in Rhode Island. The mill became one of the first successful cotton-spinning factories in the United States and was soon joined by a number of other factories in the Blackstone Valley.15 At its peak, the Blackstone River and its tributaries, described as “America’s hardest-working river,” provided power to more than eleven hundred mills along a forty-five-mile stretch between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. In 1823, a group of Boston investors took advantage of the thirty-two-foot drop of the Merrimack River’s Pawtucket Falls to establish the first large-scale, planned textile center, a town they later named Lowell.
Lowell was different from other mill towns. Relying on vertical inte-gration, the mill combined spinning and weaving under one roof. Approximately 75 percent of its workers were women and girls, some as young as thirteen. By 1840, the mills employed eight thousand women. In this true “company town,” workers lived in dormitories provided by the companies and were subject to strict codes of conduct. As the Boott Cotton Mills Museum notes, “Intemperance, rowdiness, illicit relations with men, and habitual absence from worship on the Sabbath” were grounds for dismissal from the factory and removal from the boardinghouse. The women worked about eighty hours a week. Six days a week, they woke to the factory bell at 4:40 a.m., reported to work at 5 a.m. and had a half-hour breakfast break at 7 a.m. They worked until a lunch break of thirty to forty-five minutes around noon. The workers returned to their company houses at 7
p.m., when the factory closed.
Public sentiment against women engaging in public activity was strong, but when factory owners in Dover, New Hampshire, and Lowell cut wages in 1834, workers went on strike: seven hundred in Dover and eight hundred in Lowell. A second pay cut in Lowell in 1836 led to another strike, this time by fifteen hundred young women. As they marched, the women sang,
Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave.16
Even though the Lowell strikes were not successful, they inspired a similar—and successful—strike in Amesbury, Massachusetts, when mill workers were ordered to tend two looms for the same pay. The factory owners soon reverted to their previous policy of one loom per worker.
Although the factory system was common in the Northeast by 1815, it did not become established in New York City, where ground rents were already high and continued to increase as the city became ever more crowded. In the 40 years from 1820 to 1860, the population of New York City increased by more than 550 percent, from 123,706 to 813,669.17 Additionally, New York lacked access to fast-moving rivers like those in the Northeast. As a result, no large water-powered factories were built and the putting-out system lingered and grew, further institutionalizing the sex-divided labor market. Although men sometimes worked in the putting-out, or outside, system, they were generally found only in trades that also employed women, such as sewing and shoe binding. By the 1850s, employers in other women’s industries had also adopted the outside system. Even female workers inside New York factories often used patterns imported from the outside system to structure work. In a description that is equally apt for the sharing economy today, historian Christine Stansell notes that “by dispersing female workers among thousands of individual workplaces, outside employers made it virtually impossible for women to combat the low wages and exploitative conditions.”18
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