In New York, where app-based drivers are governed by Taxi and Limousine Commission rules, driving for Uber or Lyft has presented a high capital barrier. As noted previously, drivers must provide access to a relatively new car that meets Uber requirements (high capital investment). The background check, requisite driving courses, and commercial insurance requirements also constitute a considerable capital investment. However, there are ways around these barriers. In New York City, drivers can lease an Uber/Lyft-approved vehicle from another driver or from a car service. While the cost is high—Baran, twenty-eight, noted that at least two full days of driving each week were needed to cover his rental fees and gas—such rentals can reduce the up-front costs.
Skills and capital aside, there’s also another significant difference between Airbnb and Kitchensurfing and the other services: choice. Kitchensurfing marketplace chefs and Airbnb hosts have considerable autonomy when it comes to deciding if they want to work or not and in picking their clients. As former Kitchensurfing chef Damla noted, “It’s very flexible, in terms of the gigs that you can accept or don’t accept. So it was kind of perfect for me.”
The flexibility to pick one’s schedule was also echoed by workers for Kitchensurfing Tonight. Laura, twenty-nine, told me, “I got involved with Kitchensurfing because I’ve been in the process of launching my own business and needed some steady income. I ideally wanted something that involves cooking, and so I found their posting on Goodfoodjobs.com, looking for chefs, and it was kind of the perfect thing because it was flexible. You could choose what nights you’re available to work.” Francesco, twenty-nine, said, “Part of the reason I wanted to do Kitchensurfing is because it allows me to keep a flexible schedule so I could do what I need to outside of work. And once I leave work I don’t have to take it with me; mentally that’s it. . . . It’s just [that] the flexibility is great, especially over the summer, because I’m planning on going on my camping trip and stuff like that—just like I can take off whatever day I want.” And Lucca, twenty-seven, stated, “We do personal chefing, and it’s like Kitchensurfing on a more customized level. . . . I’m doing Kitchensurfing now because my upper-end clients are slowing down after Christmas and going on vacation. When people go away, the business slows down; so now I’m doing Kitchensurfing, just until my other thing goes well.” Kitchensurfing’s flexibility was such that Randall, the Kitchensurfing chef who found himself working a swingers’ party, often works for three weeks and then takes a two-week vacation—virtually unheard of in any other career.
THE FINE LINE BETWEEN HOST CHOICE AND GUEST SCREENING
Airbnb, too, delivers on the promise of a high level of worker choice and flexibility. Hosts can use the calendar function to choose when they will rent, and the choice to rent to a guest, or not, is entirely theirs. The requirement that all users post a profile with photos and information about their interests, and the recommendation that guests explain why they want to rent a space, leads to a wealth of information that can be utilized by hosts in picking and choosing potential guests. While a good deal of attention has been paid to racial discrimination in Airbnb, less attention has been paid to the ways in which hosts screen their guests according to a number of factors, including education and occupation, photos, and personal messages.9 James, thirty-six, explained, “Things that I look for: college educated, what is their job? Like if you have a professional job. If you’re like, ‘I’m a roadie,’ I’ll probably not rent [the apartment] to you. If you’re a producer, I’m probably not going to rent to you. If you’re a lawyer, doctor, some professional thing, I’m going to rent it to you. If you’re thirty plus, I’m going to rent it to you. If you’re a couple, I’m going to rent it to you. If you’re gay, I’m definitely going to rent it to you.”
Aalia, thirty, said, “I don’t really approve everybody. I’m very picky of who I chose. . . . I totally judge by the cover. If I don’t feel good vibes, or if there’s not a long enough message about them that I feel comfortable, I just don’t do it.” Christopher, forty, told me, “We look at people’s profiles and we’re hypercritical of the way their initial interaction is. What did they write? If it’s something really sort of short and punchy, and they clearly haven’t read anything about our listing, we’ll, you know, we’ll probe a little bit to see if we can sort of coax more detail out of them to get a sense of who they are. And if they’re not forthcoming, then we just decline them.
Profile information, in conjunction with the message first received from the potential guest, is used by hosts to determine if they want to rent to a specific individual. In 2017, in an effort to decrease discrimination, Airbnb began experimenting with ways to reduce the prominence of profile photos, which were seen as a prime source of racially identifying information. When a host received a reservation request, a guest photo no longer accompanied the message; it was replaced with a stylized image of the first initial of the potential guest’s first name (for instance, a profile for Michelle would have an image of a large M). While reducing the emphasis on photos was believed to help decrease discrimination, the individual’s first name was still shown in his or her profile, allowing potential hosts to make guesses about that person’s race and ethnicity. Additionally, the image of the first initial was clickable as a hyperlink that connected to the potential guest’s profile, making the user photo, personal description, and reviews all literally a single click away. Airbnb soon abandoned the experiment, and by mid-2018 user-profile images were again accompanying inquiries from potential guests.
While de-emphasizing the photo is an important step in making overt discrimination more difficult, names can also tell a good deal about a person, even online. An Airbnb audit study found that individuals with “distinctively African American names” were 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names.10 Similar work on the website Craigslist, often described as an early sharing economy site, found “severe discrimination against African Americans, Hispanics, and Chinese-origin individuals.”11 Studies in Sweden that utilized the Internet as a research platform for examining discrimination in the housing market also found discriminatory behavior against males with Arabic or Muslim male names.12
As part of its efforts to fight discriminatory practices, Airbnb recently began to emphasize its Instant Book service. As described by the platform, “Instant Book listings don’t require approval from the host before they can be booked. Instead, guests can just choose their travel dates, book, and discuss check-in plans with the host.” However, many of the hosts I interviewed were reluctant to let go of control over their listings by using the Instant Book option. For example, Ramona, twenty-eight, told me, “Instant Book is good for when you’re looking for a place at the last minute, but that would feel much more like we are running a business. We like the idea of like discriminating and having some sense of control over when people are staying and when we’re opening up our home to people, versus Instant Book, [which] feels like they’re choosing and you’re just open for business all the time.” And Joshua, thirty-two, said, “You shouldn’t offer [Instant Book] if you have qualms or if you’re trying to pick and choose between guests, sort of like I do in the place where we live. I pick and choose, so I don’t offer Instant Book.”
Part of the impetus behind the host screening is the issue of risk and damage. As noted in chapter 2, there have been numerous documented instances of damage to homes and possessions by Airbnb guests. Screening guests as a risk-mitigation strategy takes on additional importance after bad experiences such as discovering that a guest hosted a party or rifled through one’s personal possessions or private paperwork.
James, the Airbnb host with a rooftop pool, rented out his space while he was out of town and returned home to discover that his guests had “basically trashed our place.” There were footprints on the walls, empty alcohol bottles left behind, and personal items removed from the closet. Returning to the mess affected his willingness to rent again, and he admits to �
��Google stalking” now: “Any information I can get. Copy and paste name in Google, go on LinkedIn, and go on Facebook. Stalk as much as possible. I will especially be doing a lot more of that since my last experience, but yeah, that’s pretty commonplace before I click “approve.” He wasn’t the only host to admit to seeking additional information about prospective guests. Gabriele, twenty-seven, lives alone with a young child. After several bad experiences renting to what she described as “young people, partying people that had just left home and whose mommy usually cleans up after them,” she began researching potential guests in advance. “I search information on the applicants on the Internet, then usually I pick somebody. I usually go for older people or people that have children, because I know they won’t be having parties. . . . I look at what kind of job they have; I try to find their social profile on Facebook. There’s always something available—it’s kind of scary, actually.”
Obviously, screening by Airbnb hosts is problematic and further supports the premise that the sharing economy is falling short of its promise of building trust and community. And, as Ramona notes above, some hosts reject the idea that they are running a business and should be “open for business all the time.” Hosts generally prefer to maintain full control over their hosting practices, including the availability of their home and the decision to accept a guest.
It’s this worker control that sets Kitchensurfing and Airbnb apart from TaskRabbit and car services like Uber and Lyft. While all four services promote the entrepreneurial ethos and promise that workers can be their own bosses (see chap 2 for a more complete discussion), workers were free to accept or reject as many gigs as they wished on Kitchensurfing and Airbnb. Unlike TaskRabbit or Uber/Lyft, where participants had to accept a certain percentage of gigs or face the risk of deactivation, Kitchensurfing and Airbnb workers were entirely in control of their schedules. While a lack of activity on either site might decrease one’s ranking in the search algorithms, it didn’t result in site removal or the “reeducation” practiced by TaskRabbit. This type of worker-directed scheduling, which had been more common in the early days of TaskRabbit, is correlated with an increased identification of the work with entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial ethos.
As noted, not all workers want to be entrepreneurs, and perhaps not all services can—or should—offer the option to select one’s clients. For Airbnb, after all, getting to pick one’s clients appears to lead to guest screening on a number of levels that traditional race and ethnicity audit studies have yet to address.
For workers who have high levels of social and cultural capital and skills, the sharing economy can offer a dream job with increased flexibility, choice, and control. But for workers who lack these components, the gig economy simply takes already low-level work, adds an app, and increases the precarity factor. This new economic movement isn’t equalizing the entrepreneurial playing field so much as it is highlighting the role of capital—both financial and cultural.
But there is a solution. As case studies of MyClean, Hello Alfred, and even Instacart show, there are ways to protect workers who are simply looking for a way to earn additional money, while still helping those who are pursuing entrepreneurship.
8
Conclusion
Almost weekly, new app-based services are hailed as the “Uber of . . .” There’s BloomThat, which promises flower delivery in ninety minutes or less. Dryv and Washio are the “Uber of laundry,” and Eaze is the “Uber of medical marijuana delivery.” There’s even Iggbo, the Uber of blood, which sounds like a food delivery service for vampires but is more accurately described as an app for scheduling and managing “on-demand phlebotomists,” who can be dispatched to draw blood for medical tests in a client’s home or office.1
In July 2016, a new sharing economy service seemed to reach a new low. Advertised as the “smart alternative to picking up after your dog,” Pooper was an app-based platform that promised on-demand pickup of excrement for a small monthly fee (see fig. 13). “Users snapped a photo of Fido’s filthy business and someone in a Prius would come by and collect it for you.”2 Hailed as the “Uber for dog poop,” the service promised potential workers the same perks as many other sharing economy services: “Work on your terms. Scoop when you want, earn what you want. Set your own schedule. Scooping with Pooper gives you the freedom to work whenever you want. Scoop as much or as little as you like.”
Figure 13. App screens from Pooper media materials. Screenshot by author.
There was just one issue: Pooper was—and so far, remains—fake.
The app was actually an “art project” created by Ben Becker, an advertising creative director, and Elliot Glass, owner of a boutique creative studio in Los Angeles. Friends from Pacific Sound House helped create a custom soundtrack for their website advertising video, something Becker says he thinks helped contribute to the whole aesthetic of the ruse. “Pooper is in fact a piece of art that is satirizing our app-obsessed world. Specifically, the increasing reliance on the gig-based economy to do stuff for us that we could easily do for ourselves,” Becker said.3
According to Becker and Glass, the target of Pooper’s satire was an innovation economy that prioritizes trivial “hacks” instead of addressing genuine societal ills.4 “What we’re doing is more or less just holding up a mirror to culture and society,” Becker said. “It also begs the question: What is the gig economy? Is that necessarily a good thing?” The other target: anyone lazy enough to pay an underclass of pooper-scoopers to clean up after their dog. “You don’t have to do as much for yourself,” Becker says. “You don’t have to drive for yourself. You can have someone else do your errands. . . . Do people want to live in a society where [there’s] that kind of stratification and division of labor?”5
Illustrative of such stratification, as Becker and Glass were disturbed to see, was how popular the app became with potential scoopers. More people signed up to be scoopers than pooper clients. “It’s a little bit disconcerting that it’s such a demeaning job and so many people were eager to sign up to do it,” Glass said.
In many ways, Pooper is a perfect illustration of the trends that led to the sharing economy. Although the start of the sharing economy can be traced back to eBay and Craigslist, the wholesale launch of this new economic movement truly happened during the Great Recession and its aftermath, when the official unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October of 2009.6 Meanwhile, the “true unemployment rate,” which includes discouraged workers who had looked for a job in the past year and those who are underemployed in part-time work, reached 17.5 percent.7 With rampant unemployment and underemployment, a 2014 Federal Reserve Board study found that a third of workers indicated that they’d like to work more hours at their current wage, and 49 percent of workers with part-time jobs responded that they, too, would prefer to work more hours at their current wage.8
The Great Recession also unearthed a savings gap among Americans. According to the Economic Security Index, 20 percent of the American population saw their available household income decline by 25 percent or more and lacked an adequate financial safety net to replace this lost income.9 Even those who started the recession with savings soon found themselves tapping their reserves: 57 percent of Americans who had savings before 2008 used up some or all of their savings in the Great Recession and its aftermath, and 34 percent reported that they were somewhat worse off or much worse off financially than they had been five years earlier.10
Well after the recession ended, nearly half of Americans noted that they would have trouble finding four hundred dollars to pay for an emergency without selling a possession or borrowing money.11 In many ways, it’s almost as if the recession never really ended: in the height of the Wall Street crisis, in October 2008, 57 percent of adults said their incomes were falling behind the cost of living; in 2014, 56 percent of adults echoed the same concern.12
The interest in demeaning poop-scooping jobs also highlights another element of the gig economy: workers have such a great
need for extra income they will literally pick up almost anything for the promise of extra money.
As I write this, unemployment in the United States is below 4 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has been 5 percent or less—commonly considered to be “full employment”—since September 2015. Worker incomes, too, have returned to prerecessionary levels, after accounting for inflation.13
Even so, research by the Federal Reserve Board points to an ever-increasing number of workers who are working multiple jobs, doing informal work for pay in addition to a main job, or both. In the Federal Reserve Board’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2015, 22 percent of workers were engaged in such secondary income activities; by the time the 2017 report was published, the number had increased to 28 percent.14 Nearly one in three American adults cannot get by on just the income from one formal job, even with incomes back to prerecessionary levels.
Part of the problem is income volatility. Described as America’s “hidden inequality,” income volatility is the degree to which a worker’s income varies drastically.15 The variation can be due to seasonal differences, such as a landscaper facing the winter off-season, or caused by just-in-time scheduling that creates a feast-or-famine situation as work hours vary from week to week.
While income volatility is often associated with hourly workers, it is increasingly affecting large swaths of American society. American household incomes became 30 percent more volatile between the early 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century; and recently, more than 10 percent of American households took in half the annual income that they did the previous year.16 Even though the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, 32 percent of adults said, in a 2016 report by the Federal Reserve Board, that their income varied to some degree from month to month, and 13 percent struggled to pay bills in some months owing to income volatility. Less than half—47 percent—of adults reported that their income exceeded their spending in the prior year.17
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