Hustle and Gig
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17. Potts (2015); Farrell and Greig (2016).
18. This categorization, of course, is influenced by the grounded theory work of Glaser and Strauss ([1967] 1999).
19. Ravenelle (2017b).
20. Weber ([1905] 2002).
21. Although this may seem like an extreme solution for getting children into a good public school, this type of school-district targeting isn’t unusual. Higgins (2013) reports that New York City parents have been known to target certain school zones before their children are old enough for preschool or to “borrow” a friend or family member’s home address in order to seemingly fall within the borders of a better school district. I’m indebted to Phil Kasinitz for noting that this “borrowing” of an address is illegal and a “middle-class hustle.”
22. See chapter 3 for Donald’s story, and chapter 6 for Michael’s story.
23. See Fleck (2009) and OECD (2017).
24. Oxford Economics (2014).
25. Schor (1992: Kindle chap. 2).
26. Hochschild ([1989] 2002).
27. Bianchi et al. (2012).
28. Hochschild (2012).
29. McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2017:141–42).
30. RentCafe, www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ny/manhattan/.
31. Kalleberg (2009).
32. Ehrenreich (2001).
2. WHAT IS THE SHARING ECONOMY?
Portions of this chapter have been reproduced, with permission, from Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, “A Return to Gemeinschaft: Digital Impression Management and the Sharing Economy,” in Digital Sociologies, ed. Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, 27–46 (Bristol, UK: Policy Press/Bristol University Press, 2017); and from Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, “Sharing Economy Workers: Selling, Not Sharing,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 10, no. 2 (2017): 281–95.
1. Mathews (2014).
2. Schor (2014a).
3. Schor and Fitzmaurice (2015).
4. Zipcar is now owned by Avis, which illustrates how successful platforms are co-opted by corporations.
5. Kessler (2015b).
6. Kessler (2015b).
7. Alden (2014).
8. Nadeem (2015).
9. As of April 2018, Zaarly was available only in Denver, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and northern Virginia.
10. Schor (2014a).
11. Frenken, Meelen, Arets, and van de Glind (2015).
12. Stone (2012).
13. Schor (2014a).
14. Stone (2012).
15. Thompson (2011).
16. Sacks (2011).
17. PricewaterhouseCoopers (2015).
18. For an interesting discussion of distinction and belonging in the sharing economy, see Schor, Fitzmaurice, Carfagna, Attwood-Charles, and Dubois Poteat (2016). For more on entrepreneurship, see Andrus (2014); Friedman (2014); McKinney (2013).
19. Kahn (1987:8); Rybczynski (1993).
20. Kahn (1987:9–10).
21. Simmel (1971).
22. Kahn (1987:11).
23. Tonnies (1957).
24. Tanz (2014).
25. Tanz (2014).
26. Tanz (2014).
27. Cass (2013).
28. Nanos (2013).
29. Eckhardt and Bardhi (2015).
30. Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004); Moss-Racusin, Dovidio, Brescoll, Graham, and Handelsman (2012).
31. Edelman and Luca (2014).
32. Doleac and Stein (2010).
33. Jost (2011).
34. See Greenhouse (2008).
35. Cantillon (1755).
36. Stevenson and Gumpert (1985).
37. New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993), s.v. “entrepreneur.”
38. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016a).
39. Hacker (2006).
40. Kalleberg (2009).
41. Standing (2014).
42. Weber and Silverman (2015).
43. Pugh (2015).
44. Knight (1921); Acs and Audretsch (1988); Kortum and Lerner (2000).
45. Schoar (2010:57–58).
46. Hall and Krueger (2015).
47. Whitford (2016).
48. Etsy (2013).
49. New York City landlords generally require that prospective tenants make between forty and fifty times the monthly rent or have a guarantor who makes at least one hundred times the monthly rent. In order to afford an apartment renting for $2,800, this individual needed an annual income of $112,000 to $140,000 when he signed the lease.
50. Alden (2014).
51. Kessler (2014b).
52. Piketty (201); Alden (2014).
53. Wachsmuth, Chaney, Kerrigan, Shilolo and Basalaev-Binder (2018).
54. New York Communities for Change and Real Affordability for All (2015:43).
55. Lightfeldt (2015).
56. EV Grieve (2015).
57. Hill (2015b); Poston and Khouri (2015).
58. Avent (2014).
59. Kurtzleben (2015).
60. Green and Levin (2017).
61. Roose (2014).
62. As a further illustration of the aptness of these four services, both TaskRabbit and Kitchensurfing underwent major pivots or service changes during the course of this study, and Kitchensurfing later closed its doors.
63. Frenken, Meelen, Arets, and van de Glind (2015).
64. New York City app-based drivers face particularly high capital barriers. Drivers are required to follow many of the same license, registration, and insurance requirements as drivers of yellow taxis; but unlike with cabs, all costs are assumed by the individual drivers. Estimates of drivers’ costs vary widely and depend on the type and age of the car insured, as well as on the driver’s record and experience. However, new drivers often must pay anywhere from three thousand dollars to more than six thousand dollars in insurance and licensing fees, in addition to a car payment, before ever driving a mile in New York. Moreover, drivers must pass licensing and medical exams, take drug tests, and complete courses in defensive driving and wheelchair accessibility.
65. Ravenelle (2017b).
66. Gallagher (2017).
67. Arrington (2011).
68. See Yuhas (2015); Rosario, Sullivan and Tacopino (2014); Bort (2014).
69. Bradford (2014).
70. Bort (2014a).
71. Edelman and Luca (2014); Edelman, Luca and Svirsky (2017).
72. Gregor (2014).
73. Zukin (2009).
74. New York City Planning Department, Population FactFinder. https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/.
75. According to a Business Insider profile, the idea for Uber actually came from StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp: “One New Year’s not long before, Camp and a few friends had spent $800 hiring a private driver. While Camp had made a fortune selling StumbleUpon, he still felt nearly a grand was too steep a price for one night of convenience. He had been mulling over ways to bring down the cost of black car services ever since” (Shontell 2014). Camp realized that splitting the cost with a lot of people—say a few dozen elite users in Silicon Valley—could make it affordable. The idea morphed into Uber, essentially the equivalent of nightclub bottle service for the taxi industry, a premium service for high-end customers.
76. Shontell (2014).
77. Kolodny (2010).
78. Worthman (2011).
79. Chen (2012).
80. Wright (2015).
81. Licea, Ruby, and Harshbarger (2015).
82. Hu (2017).
83. Walker (2015).
84. Peterson (2015).
85. Not all drivers were willing to answer questions regarding their race, education, or income levels.
86. Garling (2014).
87. Schor (2015).
88. Newton (2013).
89. In October 2015, Kitchensurfing Tonight changed its model to pay workers as hourly employees. As part of this change, the service also increased its prices—for example, to fifty-nine dollars for two adults (up from fifty dollars)—and began to collect a sales tax of 8.87
5 percent. The company later offered reduced-rate children’s meals, before eventually shutting down in April 2016.
90. Griffith (2015).
91. Fiegerman (2014).
92. Ravenelle (2017b).
3. FORWARD TO THE PAST AND THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL AGE
1. Schor and her team of graduate students are part of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network, and their MacArthur funding mandated the study of eighteen- to thirty-four year-olds. As Schor notes, “They were also the predominant group in the sites we were studying, so it felt like the right thing in analytic terms as well. It also seemed to make sense with our first case—the time bank—because the young and old were quite different in their patterns of participation and motives” (personal communication, October 3, 2017). As they’ve met additional older individuals involved in the sharing economy, they’ve included those workers in their sample.
2. The TaskRabbit terms of service note, “Without limitation, while using the TaskRabbit Platform, you may not . . . [a]ttempt to circumvent the payments system or service fees in anyway including, but not limited to, processing payments outside of the platform, including inaccurate information on invoices, or otherwise invoicing in a fraudulent manner.”
3. On the ransacked apartment, see Arrington (2011); on the Madrid story, see Lieber (2015).
4. Commons (1918).
5. Bliss (1902).
6. Foner ([1947] 1998).
7. Tomlins (1993).
8. Foner ([1947] 1998:80).
9. Foner ([1947] 1998:80).
10. Foner ([1947] 1998:102).
11. Foner ([1947] 1998:102).
12. In 1828, the child workers of Paterson, New Jersey, were actually the source of the first recorded strike of factory workers in America. This earlier strike was in response to factory owners’ attempts to move the dinner hour from noon to 1 p.m. Noted one observer, “The children would not stand for it for fear that if they assented to this, the next thing would be to deprive them of eating at all” (Foner [1947] 1998:105).
13. Stansell (1987).
14. Williams and Farnie (1992).
15. Although most have heard of the “mill girls” of Lowell and other East Coast factories, early mill workers were generally children. “Slater’s first nine operatives were seven boys and two girls under 12 years of age. In 1820, half of all the factory workers were boys and girls ‘of the tender age of nine and ten years,’ who worked 12 to 13 hours a day for wages ranging from 33 cents to 67 cents a week” (Foner [1947] 1998:65). It wasn’t uncommon for mill-work advertisements to target large families.
16. Foner ([1947] 1998:110).
17. US Census Bureau, Census History Staff (2017a; 2017b). The numbers came from these two sites; percentages were calculated by the author.
18. Stansell (1987).
19. As quoted in Zinn (1999).
20. Zinn (1999:339, 295).
21. See Zinn (1999); Walker (2003).
22. See Zinn (1999: especially p. 396).
23. The Fair Labor Standards Act applied only to a small percentage of workers. Elder and Miller (1979: 10) note that “only 11 million workers, out of about 33 million nonsupervisory wage and salary workers, were covered by the 25-cent minimum wage when it went into effect on October 24, 1938, and only 300,000 of those were paid less than that amount in September 1938.” Additionally, the statute excluded workers in laundries, hotels, hairdressing, restaurants, agriculture, and domestic service. While roughly equal percentages of men and women were exempt from the minimum wage provisions, the majority of exempted women (62.1 percent) earned below the eight-hundred-dollar baseline established by the law, compared to 35.6 percent of men (Metter 1994: 652).
24. Ashby and Hawking (2009).
25. Zinn (1999:402).
26. Weil (2014).
27. Weil (2014).
28. Wingfield and Isaac (2015).
29. Kravets (2016).
30. Scheiber and Isaac (2016).
31. See Leonard (2013a) and (2013b). As noted in the latter, the sharing economy services have not directly funded Peers, but some of their executives and investors have contributed funds.
32. Kessler (2014a).
33. Kessler (2014a).
34. There may be some credence to this idea. I posted an ad on the discussion forum UberPeople.net identifying myself as a researcher and seeking workers to talk to in 2015. When I reposted in 2017, asking about driver rates, my posts were deleted as “spam.”
35. In 2015, CrowdFlower settled a class action lawsuit regarding the low pay of workers. Although the original plan was for payment of an additional dollar for every dollar earned, the final class of participants was estimated at 19,992, much larger than the previously negotiated 100-worker class size. As a result, instead of workers being paid an additional dollar for each dollar earned, the settlement provided recovery ranging from forty-seven to seventy-five cents per dollar. See Otey et al. v. Crowdflower, Inc. et al., no. 3:2012cv05524—document 226 (N.D. Cal. 2015).
36. The program was the brainchild of Andrew Chapin, a former Goldman Sachs commodities trader, who proposed that Uber create a finance program where drivers could use their Uber earnings to work around issues with spotty credit. Chapin was familiar with how New York limo drivers, who are often immigrants with limited or nonexistent credit histories, financed their rental arrangements with livery services. See Lashinsky (2014); Tiku (2014); Levine (2015).
37. L. Smith (2016).
38. See Newcomer and Zaleski (2016); L. Smith (2016).
39. Bensinger (2017c).
40. Mose (2011).
41. Mangalindan (2014); Lawler (2014); Huet (2015); Rogers (2016); Roose (2014); Uber Blog (2016).
42. Huet (2015); Dickey (2014); Perea (2016).
43. Bensinger (2017a); Bhuiyan (2017).
44. Huet (2015).
45. Green and Levin (2017).
46. Isaac and Benner (2017).
47. Uber uses its “time with passenger” calculation to argue that the car service is more environmentally friendly than yellow taxis.
48. Kerr (2015).
49. Newcomer (2017).
50. Israel (2002:87).
4. WORKPLACE TROUBLES
1. Ehrenreich (2001: especially p. 90).
2. Ehrenreich (2001:89).
3. I’m not the only one to note the proximity of the neighborhood to the Asch Building. On the anniversary of the fire each year, sidewalks in the East Village are marked with chalk messages in front of the apartments where the deceased once lived, noting the name, age, and birth year of each, the date of death, and the fact that they were casualties of the fire. The building, which survived, was renamed the Brown Building and is now part of the New York University campus.
4. Kramer (1958); Geerts, Kornblith, and Urmson (1977).
5. Haller (1988); Guyton (1999).
6. Zinn (1999:326).
7. Guyton (1999).
8. When the fire started, individuals nearby, hearing the fire alarms, raced to the scene, where they were confronted with the sight of workers leaping from the eighth- and ninth-story windows to escape the flames and smoke. One of the witnesses was Frances Perkins, who later became the first woman appointed to a US president’s Cabinet. Perkins later called March 25, 1911, the day the New Deal began. “Before the fire, unions tended to tackle owners individually. Afterwards, they had the law on their side” (The Economist 2011). The fire had such a major role in reforming American labor practices that the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration office actually has a website page commemorating the hundred-year anniversary of the disaster: www.osha.gov/oas/trianglefactoryfire.html.
9. New York Times (1911).
10. Greenwald (2005).
11. Jost (2011).
12. Hamlin (1997).
13. Schor and Attwood-Charles (2017).
14. Clifford (2016).
15. Schor (2014a).
16. Bullet-resistant safety
barriers, cameras, and silent alarms are standard in yellow taxicabs in New York City.
17. Stone and Stevens (2000).
18. See Collins (2016); Wise and Burkett (2016); James (2016); Puente (2016); Leone (2016); Bever (2016); Tedesco (2015).
19. Ladegaard, Ravenelle, and Schor (2017).
20. Chen (2014).
21. Shaffe (2016); Curran (2016).
22. Ellement (2016).
23. Rocha (2016); Ryan, Hawkins, and Pascucci (2015).
24. Young (2016).
25. See Guerrero (2016); Bohr (2016); Mahmood (2016).
26. Mass, Goldfarb, and Shah (2014); Norén (2010); Plaut (2007).
27. See Koebler (2015); Strandell (2015); Balsamini (2016)
28. Manjoo (2016).
29. Kwon (2005).
30. The vast majority of for-hire drivers—whether they drive yellow taxicabs or through Uber/Lyft or a black car service—in New York City are male. Estimates vary, but roughly 5 to 7 percent of drivers are female. Norén (2010) has suggested that the exceptionally low number of female drivers may be a result of the lack of bathroom access in New York. Unfortunately, in my recruitment efforts I met only one female driver in New York, and she declined to be interviewed.
31. Dickey (2014).
32. National guidelines recommend that when cities determine crosswalk times, they build in three seconds for pedestrian reaction time, the amount of time it takes for a pedestrian to step off the curb and begin moving once a walk signal activates. But Diniece Peters, a New York City Transportation Department project manager, found that New Yorkers had a reaction time of negative three seconds. Whether they had waited patiently on the sidewalk or had already stepped into the crosswalk, New Yorkers watched the traffic light—not the walk signal—and charged out as soon as it turned in their favor, several moments before the walk signal flashed (Peters, Kim, Zaman, Haas, Cheng, and Ahmed 2015).
33. Belk (2010, 2014); Böcker and Meelen (2017).
5. SHARING IS CARING
1. Sanchez (2016); Biddle (2014).
2. Siegel (2003).
3. Segrave (2013).
4. Larson (1997).