Although the workplace protections dealing with safety and the right to unionize date back to the early industrial age and the beginning of the 1900s, American protections against sexual harassment are a direct outcropping of second-wave feminism. Some sharing economy supporters suggest that workplace protections are no longer needed—that the laws are outdated or no longer relevant—but even the newer workplace protections are no match for the sharing economy’s bulldozing of workplace protections.
This economic movement forward into the past results in an undercutting of sexual harassment workplace protections. Not only is the issue of sexual harassment rarely touched on by the sharing economy companies, but also workers don’t expect to have workplace protections. Behavior that would be unacceptable in a corporate office is ignored or explained away as “weird” when it occurs in an employer’s bedroom or kitchen or when the work is allegedly focused on the egalitarianism of peer-to-peer connections. Instead of feeling free to identify this treatment as sexual harassment, workers who find themselves sexually approached by clients struggle to describe what exactly is going on, using terms like bizarro-land to demonstrate a sense of confusion and discomfort.
Sexual harassment is hardly the only illegal activity occurring in the gig economy. Workers sometimes find that their day’s work includes a “dirty” element, since the anonymous nature of the gig economy enables the outsourcing of drug deliveries and scams to otherwise law-abiding workers. The gig economy upends our assumptions about work as an alternative to crime by turning workers into criminal accomplices who are hired for illegal or legally questionable activities. As the sharing economy rolls back worker protections, it also creates new opportunities for criminal enterprise.
6
All in a Day’s (Dirty) Work
Around six feet tall, with broad shoulders and short black hair, Jamal (introduced in chapter 4) is a graduate from a prestigious university, a school where graduates prefer to think of themselves as creating sharing economy apps—not working for them. A self-described “social media guru,” Jamal is soft-spoken and has a slight southern accent. When he gets nervous or feels self-conscious, he tends to mumble slightly, making it necessary to lean in to hear him. His Pinterest page, a tool for compiling online favorites, has dozens of followers, most of them women, and his board with the most “pins” features his ideal apartment layout, complete with a retro Nintendo-console coffee table. Clean-shaven, quick to smile, and a fan of hip-hop, he seems like your standard southern-grown, West Indian boy next door.
The son of a college professor, Jamal grew up down south and returned home after graduation. He spent a year working in Georgia to pay off a small student loan and save money. He planned to move to New York City and start a career in social media marketing. Jamal arrived in New York in February, a cold and wet time to arrive in the city, but a good time to get a jump on early spring job openings.
But New York was more expensive than he expected; and as a black man with a decidedly nonwhite name, he found that his job hunt took a while. His plan to bartend for extra money fell through. “Here in New York, places demand a certain type of person to be a bartender,” he said. “He has to already have a bartending license, or he has to be a very attractive female, which I have neither,” he admitted, laughing. When bartending and working as a restaurant server didn’t pan out, Jamal joined TaskRabbit. He described it as “an opportunity to get some money in my pocket on demand, while being able to continue to apply for jobs and conduct interviews.”
Jamal scheduled TaskRabbit gigs around his job interviews and developed a daily habit of checking TaskRabbit each morning to see what kinds of opportunities were posted. The most common listing was for delivery services. “So there’d probably be literally fifty or sixty delivery jobs within the hour,” he said. “I’d find myself being able to make between at least twenty to fifty dollars a day, just off the deliveries.”
If his bid for a job was accepted, he’d run out and do it. Sometimes his bid wouldn’t be accepted, or it would be accepted but was for later in the day. In an effort to get more work, he would take his laptop to a Manhattan public library so he could “be where the action is.” This strategy often resulted in his getting two to three tasks each day.
Jamal was fortunate to have relatives in New York; when he moved to the city, he stayed with them for several months, until family drama erupted. A month spent with friends in Washington, DC, wasn’t enough of a cooling-off period. When he returned to New York, he discovered that he was essentially homeless: unable to stay with family, too broke to pay for an apartment sublease, and missing the requisite paystubs to show a landlord so he could rent an apartment of his own.
He moved into an illegal hostel that promised free housing in exchange for labor: six eight-hour shifts each week, working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Sometimes he worked a double shift of sixteen straight hours. The work included checking people into the hostel, recording their information, and photographing their passports, as well as a good deal of cleaning. “I swept, mopped the floors, cleaned bathrooms, did the laundry and the sheets, cleaned the hair from the shower,” he said. “Oh my God, it was disgusting.”
Living and working in the hostel meant a roof over his head and a place to keep his possessions, and the constant flux of people coming and going also provided a steady source of food. The hostel was hosted in a house, and in an effort to save money, guests took advantage of the kitchen facilities to cook meals. When visitors left, their extra food often remained. “I would get some of that food,” Jamal said. Even so, it wasn’t enough:
I think I lost forty pounds that summer. I came to New York weighing 190-something, and then I went, like, 160, 150. I lost a lot of weight that year. . . . I guess when I look back at it, I did basically live under the poverty line. . . . I didn’t eat as much because, literally, the money I made, I had to portion out my food and stretch it out. So I would make some spaghetti and make sure it lasts me five days. I would do whatever I can to try and spend as little money as possible.
Online reviews of the hostel note that it has a certificate of occupancy as a three-family house that has been filled with bunk beds, sleeping as many as ten people per floor in four- and six-person rooms. Reviews mention long waits for the three bathrooms, which were shared between as many as thirty people. Jamal knew that the house was an illegal hostel, and that the crowded home didn’t conform to the fire code. “The house actually caught on fire. The whole house wasn’t engulfed in flames—just a side of the house around the front door caught on fire,” he said. “Well, the people I’m working with called the fire department, even though I told them not to. And you know what, when the fire department of New York comes, they destroy the house. So the house is basically destroyed, not because of the fire, [but] because the fire department destroyed the house with the ax and water damage and all that kind of stuff.”
After the fire, Jamal spent a day with a girl he was dating and then began crashing on the couches of friends and distant relatives, eventually renting space for thirty-five dollars a night in another hostel, one he described as “even more disgusting.” Without the option of working for room and board, TaskRabbit gigs took on additional importance. “I made sure I did TaskRabbit every day,” he said. “So basically it was just some serious home game I played.”
Jamal liked the TaskRabbit bidding system. “It felt like I had the power. It’s just that I had the power to choose which job that I want to do,” he said. “I see what people want, I get to choose. I get to choose for myself; I want to do it for them, and all that kind of stuff.”
But in the summer of 2014, TaskRabbit pivoted from a bidding system to a hourly rate (discussed in chapter 2), and Jamal wasn’t a fan of the new system. Suddenly it was harder for him to book tasks around his interview schedule. And it became even more important for him to accept the tasks he was chosen for, in order to keep his acceptance rate high and ensure he remained active on the platf
orm. Soon after the pivot, Jamal was hired for what he thought was a standard errand task: pick up and deliver drugs from a pharmacy.
“I’d done it before, so I really didn’t think anything of it,” he said. But his last prescription pickup task had involved delivering the drugs to a location two blocks away. This one was a little different—while Jamal was on the way to the pharmacy, his customer called to say that she’d just moved to China and had forgotten to pick up her prescriptions before leaving; she needed Jamal to mail her the drugs. Then the woman’s credit card was declined because she was out of the country. There was a lot of back-and-forth with the pharmacy. After a two-hour delay, Jamal was finally able to pick up the prescription.
“I got the drugs—and then I realized: this is a lot of drugs,” he said. He took a photo of the extra-large pill bottles. “That’s when I was, like—wait a minute. Is it legal to mail prescription drugs across the US border?” he said with a laugh. “I was just thinking to myself: don’t you have to go through customs?” When he realized that the medicine would need to be mailed through DHL or FedEx, the client told him to hold on to the pills until she determined what needed to happen next.
So I’m like, “Okay.” Then after that, I talked to my friend, [and] she was like: I should call TaskRabbit and tell them what’s happening. I was like, “Yeah. because it’s been a week that I’ve carried around all this—not methamphetamine, but amphetamine pills and sleeping pills. And it’s a lot—if I were to get caught with it, someone would think I’m running a meth lab.”
So I called TaskRabbit, told them what’s happening. And at first, the guy said, “Well, it’s illegal so you shouldn’t do it.” Then after five minutes, he puts me on hold and talks to upper management, because he’s never had something like this happen before. So then I get a call five minutes later. “So you know what, I think you should do it, because the Tasker does whatever the person needs to be done.” But, yeah, so he actually said I should do it anyway, because—even though it’s illegal—the client is paying you to do it, [so] you should still do it.
On the advice of his friend, Jamal had recorded the call. He played the recording for me, and I could hear his female friend’s voice as she prompted him to clarify whether the TaskRabbit employee stated the task needed to be completed, no matter what. In a slight understatement, Jamal described the situation as “problematic.” He explains, “[TaskRabbit is] saying that I should break the law for this person; but at the same time, if I were to get caught, get arrested, it’d be like—who am I working for? And TaskRabbit—here is the problem, because I’m not officially an employee under TaskRabbit’s contract. I mean, if contracts are getting worked via TaskRabbit. So if stuff was to hit the fan, I’m not protected.”
In the end, Jamal decided that he wouldn’t mail the medications. Eventually, the client arranged for him to meet up with a friend of hers and hand over the pills. But until that happened, Jamal carried the drugs with him. For a young black man in New York City, carrying large quantities of someone else’s prescription drugs is especially dangerous. Although the New York Police Department’s infamous “stop and frisk” program had declined precipitously by late 2013, the city was still conducting random bag searches as people entered the subways. “I know I was taking a risk. . . . Stop-and-frisk was ended by the time I moved to New York. So I wasn’t necessarily worried about that. But I was worried about the random bag checks at train stations, which does happen. It’s never happened to me, thank God. But I was worried about that. And if that were to happen to me, I could not say, ‘I’m a TaskRabbit; I’m delivering this.’ Because even if they did believe me, who could I go to? I couldn’t go to anybody.”
At the same time, between his hostel living situation and need to constantly be on the go for TaskRabbit gigs and job interviews, Jamal didn’t feel like he could leave the bag at home. “She didn’t give me a time, she just said, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ whenever. So I had no choice.”
It feels strange to hear a well-educated young man talk about having “no choice” in the workplace, especially in the sharing economy, where the ability to pick your work, pick your hours, and even set your own income level is nearly sacrosanct. But the freedom promised by the gig economy is often a mirage, and workers may be left feeling as though they have fewer choices than before. As part of the sharing economy’s casualization of labor, many long-held assumptions about the American workplace and the redeeming qualities of work are overturned.
WORK AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CRIME OR ENABLING CRIMINAL ACTIVITY?
William Julius Wilson, in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, writes that it’s the loss of manufacturing jobs, along with white flight from cities, that led to the deterioration of African American families and an increase in the crime rate. Without jobs, the logic goes, there are few ways to make money—and little incentive to marry. And without the social stability of marriage and work, there are fewer social controls preventing crime, both in terms of personal deterrents and “old heads” who can talk down the young men who may be considering a life of crime.1
The answer, meanwhile, is promoted in every American economic development plan: bring in industry, bring in job opportunities, and the crime rate will drop.2 The increasing employment levels of the late 1990s are even regularly offered as a reason behind the resulting crime drop. Work by “rogue sociologist” Sudhir Venkatesh further supports this interpretation: the drug dealers he encountered in the projects of Chicago were overwhelmingly poor, on governmental assistance, and living with their mothers.3
But in the gig economy, the logic that gainful employment will reduce crime—or prevent someone from engaging in criminal enterprises—is turned on its head.4 Although workers want to work and avoid trouble, the very nature of the gig economy, with its emphasis on short-term gigs and anonymity, easily lends itself to criminal behavior. Workers receive background checks, but client backgrounds are not checked or monitored in any way. It takes merely seconds to create a fake profile on TaskRabbit or Kitchensurfing, and perhaps a minute or two on Uber or Airbnb.
Unlike workers, clients are not required to provide detailed information in their profiles or post photos. A user could easily set up an account using a burner phone, random email, and a cash card and would then be able to hire workers and delegate tasks to them anonymously. Indeed, members of the criminal element appear to be well aware of the possibilities. In 2015, TaskRabbit announced to its workers that they should not spend more than three hundred dollars out of pocket on a task without company approval. Although the company was not explicit in the reasoning, several TaskRabbits I interviewed mentioned that they thought someone had used a stolen credit card or had otherwise disputed a charge after the fact, leaving TaskRabbit responsible for both the purchase and the cost of the Tasker’s time.
Although many TaskRabbits now know not to accept a task that will involve spending more than three hundred dollars out of pocket, these tasks still occur. The TaskRabbit app allows anonymized communication between the Tasker and client and provides TaskRabbit with a written record in case of a dispute. The messaging tool can be used to provide a specific address to the Tasker, to clarify task directions, or even to change the gig after it starts, as Michael, a forty-nine-year-old white male, quickly discovered.
With a doctorate in political science and a strong history of teaching and research, Michael expected that he would be hired for writing and editing jobs. Instead, few materialized. Having moved to New York to be with his significant other, he joined TaskRabbit in the spring of 2015, after the pivot. Heavyset and balding, he found that clients weren’t hiring him directly, so he began picking up the emergency tasks—work that other TaskRabbits had rejected or that had to be completed on the same day, usually within just a few hours. Many of these tasks were deliveries or errand-based tasks.5
One such delivery task seemed perfectly normal: pick up several bottles of juice from a local shop. But the task quickly grew much bigger t
han Michael had expected. “Yesterday I was sent a task to pick up some food, and the person changed the order rather dramatically from the description of the task to when I actually got to the place and said, ‘Okay, I’m here.’ The order had expanded significantly, and the total charge was something like three hundred dollars; and we’re supposed to get authorization before we spend that much. I called the support center, and they immediately canceled the task and said, ‘Don’t do this. We’ll be in touch with the client.’”
Explaining that he’d “come to realize some of the scams that are being pulled through TaskRabbit,” and that he’d encountered such a scam several times, Michael asked the call center about their decision. “They used the same language that I heard in a previous conversation, where there was another definitely scam task. And I can’t remember the language exactly, but it was something like: ‘Well, sometimes people misuse the platform to try to work around a situation,’ or something to that effect.”
Michael was paid for an hour of his time by TaskRabbit, but between the collecting of items and the need to deliver them to the client, this task likely would have earned him more money if he hadn’t reported it. At the same time, completing the task against TaskRabbit policy could have cost him his job and even money out of his own pocket. Whereas delivery services like Postmates provide workers with prepaid cards, TaskRabbit expects workers to use their own funds and then be reimbursed. Because it can take a week for TaskRabbit to reimburse workers, many of the Taskers I spoke to rejected tasks that required an out-of-pocket expenditure or accepted only tasks for which the costs were minimal. For Taskers who are living on the financial edge and who have maxed out, or nearly maxed out, credit cards, the reimbursement delay can be problematic.6
Hustle and Gig Page 17