Most hosts that I interviewed expressed concern that they would get caught, especially when they first started listing. They mentioned strategies to mitigate the risks, such as warning guests to identify themselves as family or friends. Another strategy entailed placing their location identifier pins on the Airbnb map several blocks away from the actual location (see chapter 2 for more details). But a bigger concern was detection by landlords and having to find a new place to live on short notice or possibly losing one’s security deposit.17
Many Airbnb hosts were not informed about the law. One interviewee, a twenty-three-year-old white female, became markedly anxious about my research when I mentioned the law, and asked for repeated reassurance that I would protect her identity. Those who were familiar with the law against short-term rentals often described it as a remnant of the days of tenements and rooming houses—as opposed to originating in 2010—and hence shouldn’t apply. For example, Matthew, thirty-six, told me, “They’re still arguing about a law which was designed in maybe the 1940s to protect hotels and prevent landlords from building unlicensed hotels. And it’s accidentally now hooked in this new economy.” Joshua, thirty-two, said, “There’s all sorts of laws that we all violate, probably on a daily basis, that we don’t think twice about. The thirty-day law was created in the 1970s, and it was just a completely different world. And laws never keep up with technology.”
Interestingly, the illegality aspect of Airbnb was part of its appeal for Joshua, a corporate attorney with a self-described Airbnb “syndicate” on the side. He told me that, when he talks with his partner, “we always use these Mafia terms because we think it’s funny. So we talk about the ‘scheme’ and the ‘syndicate.’ . . . We’ve talked about when we make money like it’s our ‘haul.’ In a way it’s like we’re playing games. I feel in a way like we’re playing Mafia, that we’re playing some sort of [story] like The Wire or something. Just because that’s what I like about it: it’s kind of exciting. It’s like life can be somewhat dull.”
An attorney with a law firm in New York City, making well over two hundred thousand dollars a year, can afford to treat his gig economy work as a game. He’s not dependent on it. But his “playing Mafia” and treating lawbreaking as an antidote to boredom points to a casualization of criminality within the sharing economy.
In 1982, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote about the broken-windows theory in The Atlantic. To illustrate their point that disorder begets disorder, they used Philip Zimbardo’s 1969 experiments with a car left in the Bronx bearing signs of deviance (hood up, no license plates) and a comparable vehicle left in Palo Alto, California, although without any signs of deviance.18 Within minutes of being “abandoned,” the vehicle in the Bronx was vandalized by a family that stole the radiator and battery. The remaining items of value were stolen within a day, and then “destruction began—windows smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. . . . Most of the adult ‘vandals’ were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites.”19
The vehicle in Palo Alto was fine for more than a week, until Zimbardo took a sledgehammer to a portion of the exterior. “Within a few hours the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the ‘vandals’ appeared to be primarily respectable whites.”20
Broken-windows theory suggests that any sign of disorder or deviance—such as a single broken window—will lead to more disorder. “Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. . . . But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no one cares.’ . . . ‘[U]ntended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls.”21
Uber has made a name for itself by asking forgiveness rather than permission and by taking the stance that it’s easier to pay fines and penalties than to follow the rules. When Uber enters a new market, as noted by Hector, the driver who found himself on a drug run, the platform tells drivers that it will pay their illegal-taxi fines and summonses as part of the cost of business. Eventually, as the platform’s market share increases, localities find themselves effectively strong-armed into letting the service operate.
Airbnb has likewise established itself by breaking laws against illegal hotels and making it easier for people to enter a highly regulated, and taxed, industry without following the same rules or paying the same taxes as established companies. When a company flouts the rules and earns multibillion-dollar valuations as a result, the message sent to workers and customers is hardly one of moral rectitude.
If broken-windows theory suggests that small-scale disorder can lead to wide-scale deviance, then perhaps this is best described as the theory of “dead fish rotting”: large-scale illegal efforts, carried out in full public view—such as starting an illegal hotel business by calling it an “accommodations marketplace” or opening an unregulated taxi company by calling it a “technology company”—lead to small-scale deviance by individuals. And when “disruption” and “creative destruction” are sold as ideals to strive for, we see the “breakdown of community controls” so that casual criminality is widely tolerated, hailed, and even laughed about by “primarily respectable whites.”22
In addition, a major theme of the gig economy is the focus on outsourcing. The companies outsource risk to the workers, letting them assume the costs of insurance and the financial risk of slow periods. The low incomes of most of these workers qualifies them and their families for Medicaid, while those who are marginally better off go without insurance or utilize the state exchanges, effectively shifting the cost of, and obligation to provide, health insurance to the taxpayer and government. Very successful gig economy workers may even manage to outsource their work—at least until the platforms ban such activities.23 With all of the outsourcing going on, it was perhaps just a matter of time before the criminal element also got involved.
As part of the casualization of labor, work is being returned to the home. Between hiring a Kitchensurfing personal chef, using a TaskRabbit assistant to clean one’s home, and booking a driver via Uber, middle-class homes in New York City are beginning to oddly resemble the world of Downton Abbey, but with the addition of modern clothing and without the pesky need to personally house one’s servants.24 It’s true that for the wealthy, hiring help has long been a part of life, but the app-based gig economy has made it easier and cheaper for the middle class to hire servants.25 However, whereas an upper-class home with help often had multiple workers simultaneously who could share stories and advice, today’s gig economy workers are much more isolated. Often when they find themselves in challenging situations, they’re on their own.
As a result of this return of work to the home, even those who avoid inadvertently committing any crimes sometimes discover that they are witnessing criminal activities. Joe, a twenty-six-year-old white male working as a Kitchensurfing Tonight chef, was quick to offer up a story of one of the unusual experiences Kitchensurfing chefs could find themselves in. Hired to cook for a couple, he quickly found himself in an uncomfortable situation, one rarely addressed in culinary school. The woman of the household let him into the home, and they spent a few minutes chatting while Joe set up and began cooking. Then the husband came home.
The couple disappeared to a back room, where it sounded like they had an argument. The husband stormed out in a huff. “I thought that was odd, because I was cooking him dinner and it was about to be ready,” Joe said with a laugh. “I think I asked him on his way out, ‘Are you coming back for dinner, should I . . .?’ Anyway, he didn’t answer.” Joe continued cooking. Roughly twenty minutes later, the food was done, and yet the woman had not reemerged from the back room.
I had the food out on the counter, and I sort of shouted into the bedroom, like, ‘I’m going to go now.’ And she came out and had a big bruise on her face—not exactly a blac
k eye, but maybe it was a black eye? I don’t know how long it takes to develop a black eye, but she had a bruise on her face she hadn’t had when she went into the bedroom. And so I said sort of pointedly, “Are you okay?” And she said, “Yes, yes . . .” She told me something about having fallen in the bedroom and hitting her face on the bed frame, and I said that that didn’t seem plausible and that I would really like to call the police.
After some back and forth, Joe left and called the police from the lobby. When they arrived, two officers went upstairs to interview the young woman while one stayed behind to interview Joe on the sidewalk. The woman opted not to press charges.
Weeks later, Joe remained conflicted about whether he made the right decision. After a pause, he haltingly explained:
I think that I just . . . my mother has been involved in domestic violence issues for a long time; she’s a social worker. So I have a lot of background in this stuff, and I was always told that you should call the police if there’s any suspicion of domestic violence. But on the other hand, this was a grown woman who had asked me not to call the police. So I just felt like it should not have been my place to interfere. And I decided to interfere, but I’m still not entirely sure that that’s what was best for her.
Between the discussion with the woman and the police interview, Joe was unable to make it to his next Kitchensurfing gig of the evening. He contacted the company and used subway delays as an excuse; he says that the missed appointment wasn’t a problem.
Weeks later, he still hasn’t told Kitchensurfing the truth. After a pause he explains. “As far as I know, they don’t have a policy about this. I don’t know why they would have a policy about this, because, hopefully, it doesn’t come up that often. But I just didn’t know what they—you know, it’s a sensitive subject, and I am a servant in their house, anyway.”
Describing himself as a servant highlights the challenges that Joe experiences with respect to his customers. Historically, servants were expected to keep the family’s secrets. In Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of English Upstairs/Downstairs Life, Frank Dawes explains that “the upper class relied on the total discretion of those who served them, a trust that was rarely misplaced.”26 The implementation of a modern-day Downton Abbey workplace can leave workers uncertain of the protocols. What is expected of them? In modern society, many professionals are mandatory reporters, individuals who are required by law to report abuse. But in a servant economy, discretion rules the day. Where do gig workers fall in this dichotomy?
Joe’s discussion of the lack of policies in place also raises interesting issues. Although modern workplaces are often ridiculed for their hefty employee manuals, there’s something to be said for the coverture provided by rules and regulations. Although TaskRabbit workers mentioned that the company told them to leave situations that felt uncomfortable or unsafe, of the nearly eighty workers I have interviewed to date, only one mentioned declining an in-process gig that appeared to veer into illegal territory.
“THIS IS NOT IN MY JOB DESCRIPTION”: WORKPLACE POLICIES THAT PROTECT WORKERS
I met Cody, a twenty-two-year-old black male (introduced in chapter 5), while walking my dog in a local park. He was sitting on a bench, playing on his phone, while he waited for a new delivery call; his Postmates T-shirt alerted me to the fact that he was a sharing economy worker. When we met for an interview several weeks later, he told me that he also did deliveries for UberRUSH. When I asked if he had ever delivered drugs or questionable materials, Cody told me that Postmates had a strict policy stating that they were not supposed to pick up “any drugs that are not a prescription from the drugstore.” Instead, it was the courier’s job to contact dispatch and tell them that they had a “drug package” and couldn’t complete the pickup. He explained, “If I get caught, even if I have your name, it’s still in my bag.”
I asked if he had firsthand experience with such deliveries, and he told me he had. The scent of marijuana on one pickup was so strong that he could smell it outside the package. “I handed it back. And I was like, ‘Excuse me, I cannot accept this bag,’” he said. “And they asked me why, and I was like, ‘This is not in my job description.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, really?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, really,’ and I left. And I when I got downstairs I called dispatch. And I was like, ‘Hey dispatch, I’m not doing this job because this is what this is.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no problem. I’ll get you the payout, so just get out of the building.’ So I got out of the building.” In addition to giving him an out, the company also paid Cody for the delivery and removed the negative rating he received from the unhappy customer.
In 2014, New York State loosened the restrictions on medical marijuana, allowing twenty hospitals across the state to prescribe marijuana for patients with cancer, glaucoma, and other conditions listed by the State Board of Health.27 However, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, New York City maintains a stringent enforcement of marijuana laws, resulting in nearly 450,000 misdemeanor charges from 2002 to 2012.28 For Cody, having a clear-cut company policy made it easier for him to reject the illegal task, saving himself from unnecessary risks, and even provided him with the perfect bureaucratic excuse: “This is not in my job description.”
It should be noted that I do not consider these workers to be criminals in any sense of the term. They are not seeking jobs in which they deliver drugs, defraud companies, or engage in money laundering. But the structuring of gig-based employment leaves workers in a precarious situation. By deeming gig economy workers to be independent contractors, companies deny them many of the protections often associated with employees. Since their work is temporary and their numbers are many, companies don’t seem to pay much attention to policies, training, or even ensuring that they aren’t exposed to unreasonable risks. These are workers in every sense of the term, but they have none of the standard protections of the workplace, protections that took literally hundreds of years to achieve.
The outcry over the start-up app Peeple, a self-described “Yelp for People” designed to be used in the anonymous rating of individuals, suggests that people do not want to be judged and rated on a daily basis.29 Yet gig economy workers are rated by every client, and a canceled task or ride can have repercussions for their continuation on the platforms. In the economy at large, we have at-will employment. In the sharing economy, it can be on-whim unemployment.
The casualization of labor—the transition of the workforce from permanent jobs to short-term, temporary work—results in workers exerting more effort for more uncertain returns. Not only are workers enduring greater job insecurity and receiving lower wages than in years past, as part of a general increase of workplace precarity, but sharing economy companies are not offering any of the workplace protections that Americans have come to expect: health insurance, retirement (or at least Social Security) contributions, and disability insurance. The combination of daily reviews and a lack of dependable income has left some workers feeling as through they don’t have many choices, which increases their vulnerability to being used for criminal ends or at least being involved in legally questionable activities.30
But not all gig economy workers are without choices. Successful Airbnb hosts and Kitchensurfing chefs find themselves with a surplus of choice: when they’ll work, who they’ll work for, even how they’ll work. These Success Stories are making a comfortable living in the gig economy. Unlike TaskRabbit workers or Uber drivers, who must accept a certain number of gigs in order to remain active on the app, Kitchensurfing and Airbnb workers are much freer to accept and decline work as they see fit. Although their education levels are roughly equal to those of TaskRabbit workers, they tend to bring more specialized skills and financial capital to their sharing economy work, enabling them to live the dream careers promised by the gig economy. In addition, successful workers in these two organizations are much more likely to view themselves as entrepreneurs and to take advantage of the outsourcing opportunities of the gig economy to hire oth
ers. Compared to Jamal—the TaskRabbit who felt like he didn’t have a choice when it came to carrying around a client’s prescription amphetamines for a week—some Airbnb hosts and Kitchensurfing chefs are the epitome of choice in the gig economy.
7
Living the Dream?
I met Damla at a coffee shop in the far reaches of Brooklyn. A dark-haired Turkish woman, Damla was friendly and bubbly. It was easy to see how she would be a positive and welcome presence in a kitchen.
After working for a well-known and prestigious special-events caterer and assisting with a restaurant start-up, Damla was taking a career break when she discovered Kitchensurfing. She wasn’t looking for an entrée into the food realm of the sharing economy—she didn’t even actually believe that the service was a real opportunity. “I stumbled on it somehow, I guess, looking at either cooking sites or job sites, and something popped up saying, ‘Are you a chef, and do you like to work from home?’ or something along those lines. I clicked on the website, and it asked me to create a profile. And I did, but very vague. I kind of just put my name and not a ton of other information. And then the following day someone called me from Kitchensurfing.”
Damla was surprised to get a response. She was invited for an interview and asked to provide a sample meal for ten people in Kitchensurfing’s corporate office. The platform offered to cover the cost of ingredients for her cooking audition.
The address in Brooklyn that Damla was given gave her pause. It wasn’t a commercial location. “I was a little bit weirded out by that part,” she said. But she gave the address to her roommate and boyfriend and told them she would text when she arrived. “So I got there, and immediately I was so comfortable, and knew they were totally legit,” she said. “And I texted them. I’m like, ‘This is totally cool; so I’ll tell you all about it later.’”
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