Hustle and Gig

by Alexandrea J Ravenelle

  5. See Siegel (2003: especially p. 11).

  6. Bergmann (1986:106).

  7. See Farley (1978, 2017).

  8. Benson and Thomson (1982); MacKinnon (1979).

  9. On coworkers as harassers, see Gutek (1985). On subordinates as harassers, see Grauerholz (1989); McKinney (1994).

  10. See Welsh (1999); Acker (1990); West and Fenstermaker (1995); Lorber (1994).

  11. Rogers and Henson (1997).

  12. Tsotsis (2011).

  13. Perez (2014).

  14. Although TaskRabbit has since ended its corporation-focused branch, companies continue to hire through it and other sharing economy services. For instance, several Kitchensurfing chefs mentioned being hired to cook for company meetings or parties, and other businesses and organizations have announced that Uber car services and Airbnb room rentals will be reimbursed on expense reports just like taxi and hotel expenses.

  15. Rogers and Henson (1997:224).

  16. Rogers and Henson (1997:224); also see Hochschild (1983) on emotional work.

  17. Hall (1993).

  18. Rogers and Henson (1997:232).

  19. Goffman (1963).

  20. Levin (2017).

  21. Levin (2017).

  22. Rogers and Henson (1997).

  23. Scott and Lyman (1968:46).

  24. Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001:188).

  25. See Adshade (2013); Basow and Minieri (2010).

  26. Fermino (2015).

  27. Street meat is a colloquial term for a dish of “chicken or lamb, turmeric-hued rice, maybe some shreds of iceberg lettuce and a few slices of tomato, all covered in a mix of rich white sauce and spicy red sauce.” The meal, which is sold out of carts all over the city, is also referred to as “chicken and rice” or “halal food” and is known for being affordable. A large Styrofoam container of street meat usually costs five to eight dollars (Krishna 2017).

  28. Murray (2014).

  29. Levin (2017).

  6. ALL IN A DAY’S (DIRTY) WORK

  1. Wilson (1996).

  2. See Bushway and Reuter (1997); Kasinitz and Rosenberg (1996).

  3. Venkatesh (2008).

  4. Katz (1989); Merton (1938).

  5. I met Michael by posting a task that entailed dropping a bag of clothes off at the local Goodwill.

  6. The issue of a sharing economy firm acting as an escrow provider is not unique to TaskRabbit but is found across nearly all platforms. When working for traditional Kitchensurfing.com, chefs paid for hundreds and even thousands of dollars’ worth of food out of pocket and then waited for reimbursement. Normally this occurred without a hitch, but one chef, a strong supporter of Kitchensurfing, told me that he knew of a situation involving a friend who received complaints about a meal and service. As a result, the company held on to this chef’s payment and reimbursement for several additional weeks, and the chef was considering legal options.

  7. Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao (2013).

  8. Chan (2005).

  9. Chan (2005).

  10. Ladegaard, Ravenelle, and Schor (2017).

  11. As Greenhouse (2008) notes, it’s not uncommon for employers to require store managers to work more than forty hours a week. Since they are considered members of the management staff, employers are not legally obliged to pay them overtime.

  12. Dougherty and Isaac (2014); Hauser (2015); Siegler (2011).

  13. Bialik, Flowers, Fischer-Baum, and Mehta (2015).

  14. See Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York’s Research Department and Internet Bureau (2014); Lovece (2010).

  15. Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York’s Research Department and Internet Bureau (2014).

  16. Bellafante (2016).

  17. According to media accounts, landlords maintain a black list of “problem” tenants, based on records from the New York City Housing Court, and being listed can prevent someone from getting an apartment, even if the landlord-tenant dispute was settled in the tenant’s favor (Satow 2014).

  18. Zimbardo was a social psychologist at Stanford at the time, so his choice of the Palo Alto location was convenient in addition to remarkably prescient.

  19. Kelling and Wilson (1982).

  20. Kelling and Wilson (1982).

  21. Kelling and Wilson (1982).

  22. Kelling and Wilson (1982).

  23. Schor and Attwood-Charles (2015).

  24. See Hochschild (2012) for more on the outsourcing of household activities.

  25. Marx (2013).

  26. Dawes (1973:26).

  27. Craig and McKinley (2014).

  28. Craig and McKinley (2014).

  29. Dewey (2015).

  30. See Griebling (2012); Kalleberg (2009); Hacker (2006).

  7. LIVING THE DREAM?

  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. Goffman (1963).

  2. Heatherton, Kleck, Hebl, and Hull (2000).

  3. Landier (2005); Shepherd and Haynie (2011); Simmons, Wiklund, and Levie (2014).

  4. On sex workers, see Agustin (2013); Vanwesenbeeck (2001). On the minimum wage, see Newman (1999). On blue-collar workers, see Sennett and Cobb ([1972] 1993).

  5. McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2017).

  6. Kitchensurfing’s closure happened in two stages. First, the service began to phase out the marketplace tool (the Kitchensurfing marketplace) toward the end of 2015. Chefs were given about a month’s notice in order to download messages and make backups of any records they needed. Then the Kitchensurfing Tonight service was shuttered on April 15, 2016.

  7. Ravenelle (2017a).

  8. Admittedly, one can sidestep the need for an attractive or conveniently located apartment if the price is low enough to draw interest regardless of the photos or location. One common strategy is for hosts to start by listing a low price when they first begin on the platform, in order to build up interest and their reviews.

  9. Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky (2017).

  10. Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky (2017).

  11. Ghoshal and Gaddis (2015).

  12. Ahmed and Hammarstedt (2008).

  8. CONCLUSION

  1. Entis (2014); Griswold (2016b).

  2. Price (2016).

  3. Price (2016).

  4. As noted by Allison Arieff (2016) in a New York Times Sunday Review piece, “products and services are designed to ‘disrupt’ market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems.” Especially problematic is the focus on products for wealthier users as opposed to solving the problems experienced by what the writer C.Z. Nnaemeka described as “the unexotic underclass”—single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over fifty—who have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”

  5. Schonfeld (2016).

  6. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2012).

  7. Leonhardt (2009).

  8. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2015).

  9. Hacker et al. (2010).

  10. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2014).

  11. Gabler (2016).

  12. Pew Research Center (2014).

  13. Zumbrun (2016).

  14. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2016, 2017).

  15. Morduch and Schneider (2017).

  16. Dynan, Elmendorf, and Sichel (2012).

  17. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2017).

  18. Strom and Schmitt (2016).

  19. Greenhouse (2008).

  20. Greenhouse (2008).

  21. Strom and Sc
hmitt (2016).

  22. O’Donovan and Anand (2017).

  23. The Economist (2015).

  24. Students of research methods may recognize the Western Electric studies as also identifying the Hawthorne effect, whereby the presence of the researcher affects the behavior of the observed.

  25. Greenhouse (2008).

  26. Greenhouse (2008).

  27. Greenhouse (2008).

  28. New York Times (1994).

  29. Uchitelle and Kleinfield (1996).

  30. Greenhouse (2008); for the books mentioned, see Schor (1993), Dunlap (1996), Harrison (1997), Fraser (2002), and Uchitelle (2006).

  31. Streitfeld (2004); Whalen (1995).

  32. Mieszkowski (1998).

  33. Mieszkowski (1998).

  34. Golden (2016).

  35. Greenhouse (2014).

  36. Greenhouse (2014); Kantor (2014).

  37. Ben-Ishai, Matthews, and Levin-Epstein (2014); Chaudry, Pedroza, and Sandstrom (2012).

  38. Cass (2013).

  39. Cannon and Summers (2014).

  40. Autor (2015).

  41. Gershon (2017: introduction); also see Boltanski and Chiapello (2005).

  42. Ladegaard, Ravenelle, and Schor (2017).

  43. Giddens (1998: 64–67).

  44. Lev-Ram (2014).

  45. Hsu (2017).

  46. See National Employment Law Project (2014); Brescoll, Glass, and Sedlovskaya (2013); Stone and Hernandez (2013).

  47. Kalleberg (2011).

  48. Schor (2017).

  49. Sundararajan (2016).

  50. See Galinsky, Bond, and Sakai (2008); Williams, Blair-Loy, and Berdahl (2013).

  51. Stone (2007); Moen et al. (2017).

  52. Traditionally, freelancers command a higher hourly wage, which typically accounts for their slow periods and need to pay for health insurance, office space, and higher Social Security and Medicaid taxes.

  53. Silva (2013).

  54. After a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit alleging that Uber deceived drivers with promises of “lofty pay,” the blog was taken down from the Uber site (Weise 2017).

  55. Griswold (2014).

  56. Isaac (2017).

  57. Youshaei (2015).

  58. Fottrell (2015).

  59. McAfee (n.d.).

  60. Rotman (2013).

  61. Kolhatkar (2017).

  62. Feige (1990:990).

  63. Beckert and Wehinger (2012).

  64. Portes (1994).

  65. Portes (1994:429); see also Gershuny (1979, 1985); Pahl (1980).

  66. Portes (1994:431); Venkatesh (2006).

  67. Zuberi (2006:12).

  68. Sapone (2015).

  69. Smith (2003); Wilson (1996).

  70. Katz (2017).

  71. Kolhatkar (2016).

  72. In 2017, the service was purchased by the ride-share app Gett. Unfortunately, while Juno began with aspirations of driver equality, after it was purchased by Gett, drivers were pressured to exchange their stock options for pennies on the dollar (Lazzaro 2017).

  73. Committee on Ways and Means (2007a).

  74. Roose (2014).

  75. Edelman and Luca (2014); Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky (2017); Griswold (2016a; Ghoshal and Gaddis (2015); Doleac and Stein (2010); Kricheli-Katz and Regev (2016).

  76. Hall and Krueger (2015).

  77. A. Smith (2016a).

  78. Manyika, Lund, Bughin, Robinson, Mischke, and Mahajan (2016).

  79. Conley (1999).

  80. Institute for Social Research (1994).

  81. Asante-Muhammed, Collins, Hoxie, and Nieves (2016).

  82. US Department of Labor (2017).

  83. US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (2017).

  84. Scheiber (2018).

  85. Darrin E. McGillis v. Department of Economic Opportunity (2017); Griswold (2017); Kokalitcheva (2016).

  86. Joint Committee on Taxation (2007).

  87. Weber (2015); Lang (2015).

  88. Sachs (2015).

  89. Harris and Krueger (2015).

  90. Buhr (2017); Page (2015).

  91. O’Donovan (2017).

  92. Shellenbarger (2008).

  93. Joint Committee on Taxation (2007).

  94. Erb (2014).

  95. Originally known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the lack of emphasis on jobs meant that the name had to be changed under Senate rules. The official name is the rather unwieldy Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Titles II and V of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2018.

  96. Cohen (2017).

  97. Alba (2015).

  98. Helfand (2016:153).

  99. Helfand (2016:154).

  100. Waldman (2014).

  101. Christensen (1997).

  102. Schor (1992, 1998); Botsman and Rogers (2010).

  103. Putnam (2000).

  104. Ritzer (1993).

  105. Lepore (2014).

  106. Lepore (2014).

  References

  Acker, Joan. 1990. “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations.” Gender & Society 4(2):139–58.

  Acs, Zoltan J., and David B. Audretsch. 1988. “Innovation in Large and Small Firms: An Empirical Analysis.” American Economic Review 78(4):678–90.

  Adshade, Marina. 2013. Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

  AFL-CIO. 1981. “A Short History of American Labor.” American Federationist 88(3).

  Agustin, Laura. 2013. “The Sex Worker Stigma: How the Law Perpetuates Our Hatred (and Fear) of Prostitutes.” Salon, August 17.

  Ahmed, Ali M., and Mats Hammarstedt. 2008. “Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market: A Field Experiment on the Internet.” Journal of Urban Economics 64(2):362–72.

  Alba, Davey. 2015. “Instacart Shoppers Can Now Choose to Be Real Employees.” Wired, May 25.

  Albinsson, Pia A., and B. Yasanthi Perera. 2012. “Alternative Marketplaces in the 21st Century: Building Community through Sharing Events.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 11(4):303–15.

  Alden, William. 2014. “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb.” New York Times Magazine, November 25.

  Alexandersen, Christian. 2017. “Uber Raises Rates in 8 States, including Pa., to Fund Injury Protection Insurance for Drivers.” PennLive, May 9.

  Andrus, Paula. 2014. “How to Launch a Business in the Sharing Economy.” Entrepreneur, December 24.

  Arieff, Allison. 2016. “Solving All the Wrong Problems.” New York Times, July 10.

  Aronowitz, Stanley, and William DiFazio. 1994. The Jobless Future. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Arrington, Michael. 2011. “The Moment of Truth for Airbnb as User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed.” TechCrunch, July 27.

  Asante-Muhammed, Dedrick, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, and Emanuel Nieves. 2016. The Ever-Growing Gap: Without Change, African-American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries. Washington, DC: Corporation for Economic Development and Institute for Policy Studies, August 8.

  Ashby, Steven K., and C.J. Hawking. 2009. Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

  Associated Press. 2013. “US Companies Increasingly Turning to Temporary Workers to Fill Positions.” Fox News, July 8.

  Autor, David H. 2015. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(3):3–30.

  Avent, Ryan. 2014. “The Third Great Wave, Special Report: The World Economy.” The Economist, October 4. www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20141004_world_economy.pdf.

  Baker, Dean. 2014. “Don’t Buy the ‘Sharing Economy’ Hype: Airbnb and Uber Are Facilitating Rip-Offs.” The Guardian, May 27.

  Balsamini, Dean. 2016. “The Longest Ride in Uber History.” New York Post, December 10.

  Basow, Susan A., and Alexandra Minieri. 2011. “You Owe Me: Effects of Date Cost, Who Pays, Participant Gender, and Rape Myth Beliefs on Perceptions of
Rape.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 26(3):479–97.

  Beckert, Jens, and Frank Wehinger. 2012. “In the Shadow: Illegal Markets and Economic Sociology.” Socio-Economic Review 11(1):5–30, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mws020.

  Belk, R. 2010. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Research 36(5):715–34.

  ———. 2014. “Sharing versus Pseudo-Sharing in Web 2.0.” Anthropologist 18(1):7–23.

  Bellafante, Ginia. 2016. “Airbnb and the Battle of Suitcase Alley.” New York Times, June 24.

  Ben-Ishai, Liz, Hannah Matthews, and Jodie Levin-Epstein. 2014. Scrambling for Stability: The Challenges of Job Schedule Volatility and Child Care. Washington DC: Center for Law and Social Policy.

  Benner, Katie. 2014. “A Secret of Uber’s Success: Struggling Workers.” Bloomberg View, October 2.

  Bensinger, Greg. 2017a. “Uber Mistakenly Shortchanged New York Drivers.” Wall Street Journal, May 24.

  ———. 2017b. “Uber Plans to Wind Down U.S. Car-Leasing Business.” Wall Street Journal, August 8.

  ———. 2017c. “Uber Shutting Down U.S. Car-Leasing Business.” Wall Street Journal, September 27.

  Benson, Donna J., and Gregg E. Thomson. 1982. “Sexual Harassment on a University Campus: The Confluence of Authority Relations, Sexual Interest and Gender Stratification.” Social Problems 29(3):236–51, doi:10.2307/800157.

  Bergmann, Barbara R. 1986. The Economic Emergence of Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Bernstein, Leonard. 1950. “The Working People of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the General Strike of 1835.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 74(3):322–39.

  Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review 94(4):991–1013.

  Bever, Lindsey. 2016. “‘She’s Getting Violent’: Miami Doctor Suspended after Attack on Uber Driver.” Washington Post, January 22.

  Bhuiyan, Johana. 2017. “Uber Admits That It Has Underpaid Tens of Thousands of Drivers in New York since Late 2014.” Recode, May 23.

  Bialik, Carl, Andrew Flowers, Reuben Fischer-Baum, and Dhrumil Mehta. 2015. “Uber Is Serving New York’s Outer Boroughs More Than Taxis Are.” Fivethirtyeight.com, August 10.

  Bianchi, Suzanne M., Liana C. Sayer, Melissa A. Milkie, and John P. Robinson. 2012. “Housework: Who Did, Does or Will Do It, and How Much Does It Matter?” Social Forces 91(1):55–63.