When Your Boss Is an App
"Gig work has been silently taking over new industries, but
not in the way many expected.
Brenda Handy started doing temp work nearly 40 years ago.
Back then, landing jobs took time and effort, even for a licensed practical
nurse. In the 1990s she lived in Tampa, Fla., with her three children, but got
her work through a man named Tony Braswell, who had his offices a half-hour
away, in St. Petersburg. Braswell would call nurses with the details of their
next jobs. Handy would learn her assignment and drive the family van an hour
south to Sarasota, or maybe 40 minutes east to Lakeland, to reach one of the
care facilities that contracted with Braswell’s company. She was one of his
most reliable nurses, and she liked working with him. He knew her schedule and
the jobs she preferred; he was the kind of hands-on guy who would, in a pinch,
drive out in his own car to give a nurse a ride. Still, the whole process could
be time-consuming. After a week’s worth of jobs was complete, Handy would drive
to Braswell’s office in St. Petersburg — usually getting there before he’d even
shown up and unlocked the door — and wait in the parking lot with a handful of
other nurses for him to arrive and cut her a check.
“That is how you know I’ve been in this a long time,” she
told me recently from her kitchen in St. Petersburg. “Nobody uses paper anymore.
Nobody gives you checks.” Everything, she said, is now on her phone. “I’m on
the app every day,” she said, as dinner sizzled audibly in the background. “I’m
on the app when we’re talking right now.”
Handy still works for Braswell, but the days of phone calls
and lingering outside the office are gone. In 2016, Braswell realized that he
could not scale his business up without some degree of automation. So he
created a software platform he called Gale Health, in honor of Florence
Nightingale. Handy can now log in and book work within seconds of a shift
becoming available. “It’s like — you’re at the grocery store, you see something
you like, you pick that shift,” she said. “They come up 24/7. You have to be
quick on the draw.”
Handy has a full-time nursing job and works these additional
shifts on the side. When we first spoke, she was also spending her mornings
studying to become a registered nurse. She has an overarching philosophy of
working both smart and hard — a philosophy about life stages, efficiency and
making the best use of the tools available. She is not an entrepreneur,
exactly, but she speaks a language that unifies personal and career growth.
“So, I’m going to tell you how I do this,” she said. “On the days that I have
to be in school, we go from 8 to 2. Then you get out of school. Then you can
pick and choose if you want to work 3 to 11 or 11 to 7. Then I do a full-time
on the weekend. I do 12 hours on Saturday and Sunday.” At 59, she spends most
of her days caring for elderly and infirm patients, watching the details of
their expressions, how they hold themselves, the little signifiers of how they
are feeling. Then, in her off hours, she keeps an eye on her phone.
For most Americans, the concept of “gig work” has been
synonymous with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — companies like Uber and
DoorDash, Instacart and TaskRabbit. There was a moment in the 2010s when
pundits told us to expect the “Uberization of everything”: a future in which
the typical worker would move from job to job or task to task, finding either
independence and flexibility in freelancing or, more realistically, the
precarity of working for platforms that may be light on benefits and
aggressively exploitative of labor. But there were also those who came to
wonder whether the entire phenomenon had been overblown. “The gig economy,”
Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2019, “was then and is now a more
marginal phenomenon than it might have seemed.”
We do remain dependent on traditional gig labor, a fact that
blazed into our collective consciousness with the pandemic and our sudden
reliance on workers like delivery drivers. What is less often appreciated,
though, is just how much, and how steadily, the structure and technology of gig
work have expanded beyond our most obviously “Uberized” jobs. The gig economy,
at this point, encompasses not just drivers or repairmen, not just designers or
proofreaders, but also retail workers, the armies of itinerant nurses who
crossed the country to shifting Covid hot spots and even white-collar
professionals like lawyers and consultants. Whether they seem like “gigs” or
not, countless varieties of jobs are sliding into the ecosystem of the gig —
the world, broadly defined, of technology-enabled temporary employment — and
steadily loosening the ties between workers and employers.
The battle lines that have been drawn around gig work and
labor protections usually center on the issue of classification. Workers
considered “independent” are paid by 1099, a tax category that exempts them
from labor protections like a minimum wage, unemployment insurance and overtime
— and requires them to cover their own payroll taxes. Others are paid by W-2
and covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1939. Businesses often push
to categorize flexible workers as independent; labor advocates push for W-2s.
The standards and tests that determine classifications vary from state to state
and can be open to interpretation — workers are easily misclassified.
But even this division does not encompass the full scope of
gig work and its influence. Handy, for instance, operates both within the gig
ecosystem and outside it. Gale Health insists that all its nurses be paid by
W-2, maintaining a floor of labor protections, but still falling short of
providing Handy with the level of benefits she can get from a regular,
inflexible, full-time job. Hers isn’t the only industry in which some of the
benefits once associated with W-2 work have grown complicated. Both inside and
outside the gig world, the century-old compact that has determined who is
entitled to key protections is eroding. There aren’t many labor questions more
consequential than how we redefine or replace it.
No one is entirely sure how many Americans are working gigs,
in part because the definition of gig work grows muddier by the year. Labor
economists are certain the practice is growing, but it remains incredibly hard
to measure. Annual surveys conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are not
designed to capture gig work as a category, and studies elsewhere use different
parameters to define it. In an annual study commissioned by the “work
marketplace” Upwork, 39 percent of the U.S. labor force was found to be doing
some variety of freelance work last year — a share representing around 60
million people and $1.35 trillion in U.S. earnings, an increase of $50 billion
over 2021. A study by Pew Research Center, focusing more narrowly on
platform-based gig work, found 16 percent of U.S. adults had found work via an
online platform at some point. Depending on how you define them, gig workers
include people taking all sorts of temporary jobs. The person taking tickets at
a basketball game or your order at McDonald’s may be picking up shifts using an
app. Copywriters and marketing professionals offer their services on Upwork or
Fiverr or via LinkedIn. There are bartenders, carpenters and even doctors
looking down at their phones right now, searching for their next shift.
The platforms all these workers use vary so widely in their
rules and structures that it’s difficult to pin down the boundaries of the
modern gig economy. Some platforms are backed by Silicon Valley venture capital
and have global ambitions, while others compete in smaller markets or specific
industries. Some use workers to fulfill discrete tasks for customers, while
others connect labor with traditional employers, taking on the role of a
staffing agency. Some allow workers to pick and choose assignments without
consequence, while others penalize them for not logging on or for declining
tasks. A lawyer on Upwork can set his or her own rates and negotiate directly
with clients, but shift-working platforms generally post jobs with a rate
already established. For many delivery and driving platforms, rates vary, per service,
according to closely protected algorithms that leave income uncertain. Each of
these details can have profound impacts on the daily lives of workers. Even in
high-income jobs, platforms are in a position to mediate disputes and control
access to work; with low-income labor, workers may find themselves entirely
dependent on the largess and the algorithms of the platforms they use. About
the only thing all these workers have in common is that they are beholden to
reviews, with just a few negative responses holding the power to dry up their
income or even get them booted from their preferred platforms.
Kristen Anderson, the chief executive of a portable
workplace-benefits platform called Catch, compares gig work to the concept of
the K-shaped economic recovery, in which some industries bounce back from a
recession (the upper leg of the K) while others continue failing (the lower).
“I think gig work is K-shaped,” she told me. “The idea of the independent
high-earner versus the independent low-earner. Freelance by choice and
freelance by force. They have totally different experiences and totally
different needs.”
Highly educated white-collar workers are especially well
positioned to benefit from flexible work arrangements, using them to create
better work-life balances, with time easily carved out for things like family
or travel. Samer Bazzi, an online marketing professional, is a longtime
freelancer who charges $200 an hour for his services through Upwork. There was
a time when he tried to operate outside the platform, but he returned during a
bout of kidney disease. “I had a lot of appointments and things that I had to
go to,” he told me. “So I hopped back on Upwork.” Freelancing, he said, was not
the walk in the park many people imagined. It only makes sense, in his opinion,
when you’re making upward of $100 an hour and your reputation is good enough
that companies start coming to you. Right now, Bazzi splits his attention
between the jobs that come to him and the not-insignificant task of generating
new leads. “If I’m down to like two or three clients,” he says, “I’ll go on
Upwork, I’ll send out 100 proposals. Out of that 100, you’re going to get like
10 replies and maybe two or three clients.” One of the biggest challenges, he
told me, is managing your reputation on the platform: “Not everybody knows
that, hey, if you leave me a three-star review and it sounds OK to you, it’s
not really OK for me. After a contract’s closed, you’re hand-on-your-heart
until the feedback is in.”
Another Upwork user, Jaime Hollander, came to depend on the
platform after moving to the suburbs of New York with two children, creating a
commute that she found impossible. Full-time gigging let her work from home,
stay close to her children and steadily increase her hourly rates. She was
lucky, she says, because her husband’s job for a nearby school district offers
benefits. Bazzi pays more than $900 a month for his health insurance. (“Health
insurance,” he says. “Holy cow.”) Both have set up their own companies,
enabling them to write off expenses and avoid the tax pitfalls of a 1099. They
are, literally, small businesses. Hollander has even hired a handful of people
herself — as full W-2 employees.
For the working class, choice comes at a higher price. In
many low-income jobs, flexibility has become entangled with the idea of
just-in-time labor and staffing, a practice that cuts costs by slashing back on
full-time work and making up any shortfalls with overtime, reduced breaks or
last-minute workers brought in from staffing agencies. (This leaves just enough
workers to meet demand — or, perhaps, not quite enough, squeezing excess
productivity out of whoever is there.) Companies that operate this way need to
be able to hire temporary staff quickly. They have found flex-working platforms
an efficient solution. According to an advertisement for Snagajob, a platform
for on-demand jobs, “Seventy percent of our jobs are filled in 10 minutes or
less.”
And it is here, among the working class, that the boundaries
of the gig economy have become blurriest, with the technology and the concepts
of gig work bleeding into the structure of regular employment. It is on-demand
employment that has produced many of the working arrangements Americans have
spent the past decade identifying as faintly dystopian. On-demand employment
may mean you are subject to strict requirements for how many hours you work,
but must compete for unpredictable shifts on online platforms, as if they were
hot concert tickets. In retail work, it may mean mandatory overtime during peak
shopping seasons and unreliable week-to-week income. In an Amazon warehouse —
or even working from home on your laptop — it may mean intense computerized
tracking of your minute-by-minute productivity, with grave consequences for
even small variances. For railroad workers it may mean being denied, or
penalized for taking, sick days during busy periods. These conditions easily
cross the borders between gig and nongig work. Amazon, for instance, uses
flexible scheduling platforms to enable full-time workers to choose shifts,
letting them accrue paid time off as they work or taking it away via an
automated penalty system — an arrangement that borrows some of its flexibility,
uncertainty and technological control from the world of gigs.
It’s also symbiotic with actual gig work: The wages are low
enough that many employees do side work for platforms like DoorDash and Uber.
(It is to those businesses’ advantage that flex workers accrue benefits from
Amazon; the extra income they offer, meanwhile, allows Amazon to keep pay low.)
‘I operate as if I’ve already been fired.’
Daniel Olayiwola is one such Amazon associate, working a
“flex schedule” in San Antonio; he also creates content about the experience on
a YouTube channel called “Surviving Scamazon.” After five years of experience,
he earns $18.40 an hour. On his flex schedule, he told me, he has to work 30
hours. “If you don’t, you get a point, and once you get to 8 points, you’re
fired.” (That’s 8 points within a 60-day period, according to an Amazon
spokesman.) Show up late, or miss a shift, and you get points. Shifts become
available at specific times, and flex workers have to sign up quickly — some
set alarms to remind them the moment shifts are released — “or else you’re
going to end up working nights.” In this job, Olayiwola told me, you have to
diversify to earn a living wage. Some drive for delivery platforms during their
time off. Olayiwola takes gigs as a roofer, and tries to schedule some hours
every few days. “You have to get creative,” he says, “in how you structure your
life.”
Olayiwola’s job at Amazon comes with a W-2; he is covered by
employment insurance, liability insurance, workers’ compensation. Still, he
stakes out his schedule via a platform, taking shifts on demand. He must meet
productivity quotas and keep careful track of break and bathroom times. Falling
short on any metric could prompt a review process. “They put you in a situation
where they have very ample opportunity to fire you,” he says, describing a
cycle of penalties and rehirings. “They’ve fired everybody I know a couple of
times. I operate as if I’ve already been fired.”
It’s hard not to be apprehensive of the ways in which the
least pleasant innovations of the gig economy, and the technology that enables
them, could seep into ever more industries and jobs — a future in which the
“Uberization of everything” doesn’t mean eliminating regular employment, just
forcing it to operate in increasingly giglike ways. David Weil — who served in
the Labor Department under President Obama and later as dean of the Heller
School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University — sees the
expansion of gig working as part of a larger story, one he calls “fissuring.”
When corporations started offshoring manufacturing in the mid-20th century, he
says, they did so in part to access cheaper labor in other countries. Soon they
found ways to do something similar at home, contracting out for roles that
would, in the past, have belonged to their own pool of workers. The janitors at
a tech company like Apple, for example, might once have been direct employees,
entitled to benefits similar to those of their peers. Now they can be employed
by a cleaning service with its own labor policies — severing, or at least
loosening, the legal ties between them and the company whose offices they will
clean.
Weil considers companies like Uber and Lyft to be
“hyper-fissured.” They minimize labor costs by categorizing all their drivers
as independent — people with, in theory, other jobs and other access to
benefits — and casting themselves as mere management systems that allow those
workers to operate. Given their power over nearly every aspect of that work,
though, many see these brands not as systems of management but of employment.
“So much of the platform world, they want to have things two ways at the same
time,” Weil says. “They want as much control as they possibly can of the
product and the service — whatever the targets are related to product
innovation, service and delivery — but they don’t want the messy problems of
being an employer.”
The depth of this particular fissure — the obvious way these
platforms maximize control over workers while minimizing obligations to them —
has sparked multiple battles over how the law should categorize laborers. In
courts and in legislatures, workers and labor advocates have butted against
tech companies and business interests. The latter have scored plenty of wins.
In 34 states, legislation has already been adopted that specifically exempts
“Transportation Network Companies” (TNCs) from some state and local labor
standards. The gig-working platform Handy, which has since been purchased by
Angi Inc., has backed legislation that would ensure those who found jobs on
apps or platforms could more easily be considered independent workers; 10
states now have such “marketplace platform” laws on the books. And a growing,
well-funded lobby for platform work, the Coalition for Workforce Innovation,
has argued for a third labor classification, beyond employees and independent
contractors. This category would be created simply by having workers sign a
contract called a “Worker Flexibility Agreement,” in which they trade away
protections like a minimum wage for the ability to take outside work — thus
giving platforms, the argument goes, freedom to offer piecemeal selections of
perks and benefits to entice labor.
The strongest alternative to all of this is a standard
called the “ABC test,” which gained notoriety during a class-action suit
against a California courier and delivery service called Dynamex Operations
West. In 2004, Dynamex converted all of its drivers from full-time employees to
independent contractors. After much litigation, the California Supreme Court
ultimately relied on the ABC test — which sets a high bar for considering
workers independent — to uphold a lower-court verdict for the plaintiffs,
sparking a flurry of political action. The State Legislature passed a measure
codifying the ABC test into law. In reaction, TNCs including Uber, Lyft and
Instacart pushed for a state ballot measure, Proposition 22, that would place
their drivers in a category of worker entitled to only limited benefits. The
proposition passed in 2020, but has been hindered by legal challenges. Versions
of this battle have occurred in states across the country, and even nationally.
The House of Representatives has twice passed the PRO Act, a law focused on
union organizing that also adopts the ABC test at a federal level; both times,
in 2019 and 2021, it languished in the Senate. It was introduced a third time
this February.
What does ABC stand for in ABC test?
The test for whether an individual is an independent contractor
as opposed to an employee is threefold: 1) does the individual work
independently of the employer's control (A = alone); 2) does the individual
maintain his own place of business (B = business); and 3) does the individual
practice or work at an established trade, and exercise control over his own
schedule and method of operation (C = control)?
https://www.yourdictionary.com/abc-test
At the same time, the sheer variety of gig-working
arrangements has continued to expand, outpacing the speed of most moves to
regulate or define it. Many of the newest platforms in the field actually bill
themselves as attempts to bridge the gap between flexibility and security —
using the tools of gig work to solve the problems of gig work. Yong Kim, the
founder of a platform called Wonolo, told me his hope is to build a new model
for protecting workers. Kim came to the United States from South Korea as a
teenager and has memories of walking into stores with help-wanted signs, only
to be turned away — “I couldn’t get a job at a gas station,” he told me,
“because of the way I looked and the way I spoke.” His platform connects
workers with businesses in need of on-demand staffing. “Most of the
gig-economy-based platforms, they are connecting workers with consumers,” he
says. “If someone needs food delivered to their house, they use it. In our
case, one side is actually businesses. There are companies like Hello Fresh and
Coca-Cola that also have to think about the well-being of the workers. Can we
design it in a new way and innovate around that?”
One aspect of his company’s design is to require that
workers are paid the same hourly rate that a company’s full-time employees get
for the same labor. Another is a new offer of portable occupational accident
insurance, which is paid for in part by Wonolo, in part by the hiring company
and in part by the worker. The platform is also trying, Kim says, to offer an
affordable health care program — a difficult task, because of the way insurance
is regulated state by state.
About two million workers use the platform. Kim estimates
that half of the active users do so on a part-time basis. (“They may have
another part-time job at Walmart or Target and pick up jobs as needed.”)
Another 25 percent of active users work two or three different jobs through
Wonolo itself. The final quarter, Kim says, are “people who I call truly
flexible” — they might work full time for a few months and then disappear for a
while, or use their accounts at seemingly random intervals. Depending on the
situation, he said, some of these two million workers could be considered W-2
employees.
Much of what Kim has done is simply to take a few steps back
toward a model established decades ago by traditional staffing agencies. Such
an arrangement might be attractive to gig workers, compared with the
competition, but might still strike labor advocates as a net loss. Wonolo, in
fact, has in the past been an active member of the Coalition for Workforce
Innovation, and Kim has expressed interest in the establishment of a third category
of worker. Conventional staffing agencies have not themselves been bulwarks of
labor protection. It’s an industry that aims to provide flexibility while
trimming labor costs, which means even the most innovative founders may find it
challenging to arrive at an equitable deal for workers.
Weil, for his part, does have some optimism that working
arrangements can evolve in ways that do not abandon protections for vulnerable
workers. “I think certainly people are going to have more different jobs — by choice
and by necessity — than they had 20 years ago,” he told me. “Certain things
need to be more portable. You need to have portability for pensions. You need
to have funds to help yourself to become trained in new areas. Portability of
paid leave. Portability of workers’ compensation.” All of this, he said, was
possible, in the right environment — “We can do that!”
The gig economy continues to grow. The philosophy of
flexibility and just-in-time labor management continues to move from industry
to industry. And the technology of gig work — the “flexible” scheduling that
leaves workers competing to seize shifts; the elaborate point-and-penalty
systems that make work feel like a high-stakes game; the collection of data to
monitor every aspect of labor down to the frequency of mouse movements and
bathroom breaks — all of this continues to creep into new corners of the
American work force. With each of these developments, the future of work is
being renegotiated, not just through legal and political arguments but also
through businesses’ experimenting, sometimes aggressively, with the shapes work
can take. At its best, the gig economy can enable workers to balance child care
or illness with a career, expand access to jobs and speed business staffing. At
worst, it gives opaque, impersonal and sometimes draconian platforms immense
control over not just workers but also over everything else that depends on
their labor: our warehouses, our hospitals, our groceries, our supply chains.
The reason that Brenda Handy, the licensed practical nurse,
keeps her full-time job — the reason, she says, she will always keep that job —
is the package of benefits that comes with it. She gets unemployment insurance,
accident insurance, access to a group health plan and a retirement plan. Even
Gale Health, which hires by W-2, doesn’t provide the same benefits. Other parts
of the industry pay by 1099, which Tony Braswell knows can be a precarious
category. He says he meets with nurses who have to pick up shifts around scant
child care, nurses who are living in their cars, nurses who struggle to keep
their lights on. He has seen horror stories online, like a woman surprised by a
$13,000 tax bill she was unable to pay — one of the more costly aspects of
being classified as a contractor.
Braswell is currently speaking against the practice of
classifying health care workers as independent contractors. Doing so, he
argues, will further worsen a nursing shortage and leave the elderly population
neglected and underserved. The industry, he says, needs flexibility and
stability at the same time. Nurses shouldn’t be required to continually
negotiate their jobs or act as independent businesses; they are overworked and
vulnerable enough. “We can’t lose nurses,” he says. When Gale did a small
survey of its nurses last year, it found that 65 percent were working per diem
rather than in full-time jobs — but, according to Braswell, “they want to work
full time. They just want to work on their own terms.”
Gale Health is used by more than 60,000 nurses, and Braswell
now provides labor to facilities across the country. It was, in the end, the
online platform — the structure built by the gig economy — that enabled him to
scale up, both expanding his reach and allowing him to offer perks like paying
nurses within minutes after they complete a shift. (“I want people to be able
to stop for groceries on the way home,” he says.) He wants, he says, to provide
benefits. He pays into workers’ compensation for his nurses and is doing his
best to offer health insurance. But without a government mandate requiring that
such benefits be provided, he says, it may be difficult for Gale Health to stay
competitive with other platforms; the usual race to the bottom, in which
platforms work to minimize every cost associated with labor, could prevail.
Handy, for her part, recently lost her life savings when, a
few months before she was scheduled to graduate, the nursing school she was
attending shut down amid an F.B.I. investigation of fraudulent institutions; it
had never been properly accredited, and all of Handy’s tuition money was gone.
It’s a setback that she, despite her two jobs and a lifetime of work, was not
prepared for. “I was on cruise control,” she told me, referencing her packed
schedule. “I didn’t want to work nights — I wanted to pull it the way I wanted
to pull it. But now I can’t stop. I’ve got to keep pushing. I’ve got to keep
working.” She is taking more shifts than ever.
________________________________________
Lauren Hilgers is a writer based in New York. She is the
author of “Patriot Number One: A Chinese Rebel Comes to America.” Derek Abella
is a Cuban American illustrator based in Brooklyn. He is known for his
dreamlike style."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/magazine/gig-jobs-apps.html
