Abstract
Written by 33 international authors and organised by four editors, Brian Dolber et al.’s book The Gig Economy provides more than just a contemporary examination of a rather cool-sounding part of capitalism, the ‘gig economy’. Behind the trendy name lurks a reality of work that is anything but cool. The book’s 17 chapters show as much.
One of the volume’s key lessons appears in the book’s first line, in which Michelle Rodino-Colocino says, ‘if we don’t band together, it’s only going to get crappier’ (p. 3). The notion that work is going to get crappier describes not only the neoliberal workplace but the gig economy as a whole. Crappy work remains part of the gig economy that, according to the US Department of Labor, is defined as ‘a single project or task for which a worker is hired, often through a digital marketplace, to work on demand’ (p. 4). The upside is that the resulting, often highly standardised working conditions can create circumstances that can unify workers throughout the gig economy in efforts to improve them. In other words, it seems that gig workers are ‘recognising their common interests’ (p. 4) for higher wages, shorter working hours and better working conditions.
Unlike many other workers, however, gig workers are struggling for recognition in a very particular way. They, for example, ‘demand immediate recognition of drivers’ rights as employees’ (p. 5). Gig workers are employed under the managerial-legal fiction of being contractors, not employees, by ‘the captains of data-mediated capitalism’ (p. 5). Gig management is often aided in this pretence by algorithmic management, which relies on mathematical algorithms as a technical form of control.
In this way, management ‘cultivates a comforting sense of technical neutrality’ (p. 7). This is highly useful to management. It can set up control systems, engineer surveillance and discipline workers while pretending that these are only technical issues. In reality, however, such algorithms are essentially managerial ideas formulated as mathematical formulas. These do exactly what management wants them to do. One might indeed call this version of algorithmic control, ‘algorithmic oppression’ (p. 8).
Management finds this particularly enticing in relation to the so-called ‘Never Girl who never takes a vacation or holiday, never asks for a rise, and never fails to please’ (p. 8) – and of course never goes on strike. The managerial ideal of the ‘Never Girl’ is powerfully assisted through the managerial fiction of workers as contracted gig workers because the US NLRB, for example, excludes such workers from accessing ‘key labour rights such as the right to unionise and bargain collectively’ (p. 23), which is a human right covering all workers with no exceptions.
In addition, corporate managers – or those who might be called corporate apparatchiks – also like to offload unwarranted elements of production onto workers. This is what economists refer to as ‘externalisation’. It involves bringing it about that someone else bears the costs of what capitalism does, including environmental vandalism or underpaying workers. In the case of gig workers, offloading costs onto workers is pushed through even though ‘four in five drivers [for example, want] health insurance [. . .] about 79% would like to receive overtime pay, while 74% would like paid sick leave and access to a retirement plan’ (p. 40).
By contrast, ‘gig companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars [. . .] to avoid reclassifying their workforce as employees’ (p. 42). The pay-off for companies and corporations is huge, as long as gig workers can be managed through a platform and kept in the insecure status of being contractors, not employees. This is now a global phenomenon. The situation of gig workers in India, for example, is even worse. In India, digital platforms for domestic workers have ‘grown at a rate of 60%, month on month’ (p. 47), pushing Indian domestic workers ever deeper into informal work.
These ‘on-demand platforms provide a short-term service, closest to the Uber-model of the gig economy’ (p. 49). Of course, the Orwellian language of managerialism has to remain deceptive when seeking to smokescreen reality. It seems fair to describe it as a form of gaslighting, a term describing a deliberate blurring of reality to get the victim to question their own perceptions. A good example is the managerialist word ‘partner’. On this topic, one worker said ‘they call us partners, but that is just a misnomer. Eventually, they do what they want to do and we have no option but to obey. Is that what a partner is’? (p. 52).
The basics of the gig economy also apply to another group of workers, sex workers, who, in addition to precarious working conditions, also experience ‘stigmatisation’ (p. 59) as Lauren Levitt outlines. And indeed, ‘sex work shares many characteristics of the gig economy’ (p. 61). Like ‘gig work, sex work frequently denies workplace rights such as a minimum wage, maximum weekly hours, or protection against discrimination’ (p. 62). Interestingly, ‘many [sex] workers have day jobs, or on-going employment outside the sex industry [. . .] Liz works as a receptionist in a funeral home part time and at the same time as being a dominatrix’ (p. 68).
As one might expect, there is an industry that claims to help workers into the gig economy. It publishes guide books on how to become a gig worker. The key message of these guide books is that they ‘conceive success and failure as individual rather than structural’ (p. 76). In other words, horrific working conditions, insecurity and low wages are the worker’s own fault; they have nothing to do with management and capitalism. Instead, gig workers are told to ‘embrace a gig mind-set [which] involves learning to monetise a passion’ (p. 80). The perversion continues with ‘life as a portfolio [and the] life-ing of work’ (p. 82). Much of this is designed for the ‘idealisation of gig work [to eventually] substitute life for work’ (p. 85) with the goal of ‘self-help becoming self-blame’ (p. 86).
The supposedly neutral gig economy also impacts negatively on people outside it, however, as Brian Dolber and Christina Geisel’s examination of Airbnb shows. The ‘company reinforces racial segregation and gentrification of US housing markets [with] most [of] Airbnb’s revenue [going] disproportionally to new white residents and speculators’ (p. 111). In other words, ‘Airbnb […] perpetuates structural racism’ (p. 112). Beyond that, ‘Airbnb has developed a programme, Airbnb Citizen, which mobilises petit-bourgeois hosts towards political action in order to protect corporate interests’ (p. 112). On the whole, ‘Airbnb reflects neoliberal and neo-fascist tendencies in mobilising consumers in its interest’ (p. 112).
As one might have expected, academic labour is not excluded from all this, as the process of ‘Uberisation moves academic labour into the sphere of the gig economy’ (p. 125). Here too, the neoliberal university and the gig economy are ‘shifting [their] focus from rights to risks’ (p. 126). Increasingly, management is shifting these risks onto academic staff, who ‘are now expected to be social entrepreneurs and enjoy it’ (p. 126). Perhaps even more than in the case of Uber, academics move from ‘project to project [. . .] a determining character of the gig economy’ (p. 127). Meanwhile, ‘over 70% [of US academics] are in non-tenure-track positions’ (p. 128) – signifying ‘gig academia’ (p. 131).
For gig academia, too, the neoliberal ideology of ‘being your own boss draws more [. . .] workers into precarious careers’ (p. 160) – often with no careers at all, but a high degree of ‘financial insecurity’ (p. 160). Beyond the shiny promises of being your own boss lurks the reality of the gig economy, namely, that algorithms and other ‘socio-technical features of platforms reinforce [. . .] social inequality’ (p. 162). This works not only in academic labour, but in many other sectors as well.
For ‘platform-mediated sex work [for example, this means that] platforms aim to squeeze the most value out of com-model labour [. . .] collecting 40% to 70% [of all] earnings’ (p. 168), as Kavita Ilona Nayar notes. Worse, ‘marginalisation of sex work gives platforms more control over their labour and the ability to institute unfair terms and conditions with little pushback’ (p. 168). The set-up also feeds ‘the myth that a model can create their own stability’ (p. 170). Worse, algorithms linked to cameras also work their magic as ‘MyFreeCams use “camscores” to rank models’ (p. 170).
Of course, there are plenty of online platforms ‘seeking to incorporate cultural practices into profitable business practices’ (p. 180). But the ‘class struggle has not vanished; it has been remade and masked’ (p. 180). In academia, as in sex work, as in many other areas of the gig economy, what Randy Nichols calls ‘hope labour’ (p. 181) is propagated. Hope labour exists when ‘people provide free labour hoping it leads to employment’ (p. 181) – often a rather unfulfilled hope.
Virtually all of this depends on a massive amount of data. This data – ‘big data’ – feeds digital capitalism. Indeed, ‘data is to digital capitalism what oil or minerals have been to earlier industrial stages of capitalism, for it must be mined, extracted, and refined by algorithms’ (p. 190). ‘Algorithms have enabled us to “datafy” the world’ (p. 190). Perhaps Uber is the prime example.
Uber […] rents hardware and software from AWS’s Cloud platform and relies on Google for mapping, Braintree for payments, SendGrid for emailing, and Twilio for texting […] Uber offloads the costs of transportation to its drivers […] Uber engages in what we call data fracking […] Uber’s app penetrates deep beneath the surface of everyday life to collect, direct, and leverage valuable flows of data for competitive advantage, often creating public hazards for consumers, drivers, and municipal planners from its data hoarding in the process […] with each ride or delivery transaction, Uber amasses a wealth of data. (p. 192) Uber often uses data it collects against drivers […] Uber leverages data on its drivers to control them [and finally,] Uber’s ratings system makes management omnipresent. (p. 193)
In other words, Uber – like many other platforms – have established the near perfect system of surveillance capitalism. George Orwell could hardly have come up with a more evil ‘Big Brother is watching you’ system. The sheer wickedness and perfection of these systems do indeed constitute ‘yet another blow to unions’ (p. 207). In order to fight these blows against trade unions, perhaps what is termed ‘platform organising’ (p. 207) is needed. Platform organising takes three forms (p. 207):
(i) labour and solidarity organising: this is the online organising of a highly skilled core workforce at a tech company; (ii) resistance organising: this is the organising of workers’ resistance to the gig economy, as well as resistance to companies governing the labour force through digital platforms; and finally, (iii) counter-platform organising: this is the development of specific counter-platforms for workers dedicated to facilitating communication among workers for the purposes of political action, mutual support, strikes, boycotts, and labour organising in general.
Of course, once communication is channelled through online platforms by management, ‘asymmetrical communication regimes’ (p. 209) are established. In that way, ‘management dominates labour communication both externally and internally’ (p. 209), making it even harder for labour and trade unions to organise. Because of this deficiency or structural advantage of corporations – but also for other reasons – labour’s communication is forced to rely on two forms: communication ‘organised through mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, slack.com, etc.; the second form are dedicated labour-organising platforms that are purpose-built for worker-to-worker communication’ (p. 213).
Trade unions and workers need to make sure ‘that platforms [do not] become seen as the ends rather than the means for developing worker power’ (p. 218). Beyond that, a central theme of the book is what Callum Cant and Jamie Woodcock describe in the following way: ‘while a central premise of platform capitalism is that workers are no longer workers but rather independent contractors, the struggles documented here show that whether they are categorised that way or not, workers are finding new ways to collectively struggle’ (p. 266).
Michelle Rodino-Colocino and Chenjerai Kumanyika end the book by repeating the very first line: ‘if we don’t band together, it’s only going to get crappier’ (p. 277). This testifies to the key message of a brilliant book that brings together a truly global set of insights into the gig economy.