Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible>.
Speaker 1 00:05 This is the annex or sociology podcast. I'm Joseph Cohen from the City University of New York. Today we sit down with Alexandria Ravenel from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to discuss her new book hustling game on life in the Gig economy. Our discussion was recorded on August 26 2019.
Speaker 2 00:28 Okay. We're here with Alexandria Ravenel who is joining UNC next fall? No, this fall. I'm actually already there. Oh, I'm on maternity leave. Oh, congratulations. Yeah. And she is the author of Hustle and Gig with the University of California press. It was a book that I was hearing about tons during the essay when I was snooping around. People were like, Oh, you gotta talk to Alex, Andrea Ravenel and you got to hear about her book. So, uh, thank you very much for sitting down with me today. Tell me about the book hustle and Gig. What's it about?
Speaker 3 01:00 Sure. So it's hustling Gig, uh, struggling and surviving in the sharing economy. And it is based on interviews with nearly 80 workers for four different services, Airbnb, Uber, Taskrabbit, and kitchen surfing, which was a rent a chef service that actually closed as I was studying it. But I don't think I had anything to do with that. And Hustle and Gig tells the lived experience of workers in the sharing economy or the gig economy workers who are very much outside standard workplace protections, workers who are experiencing a movement forward to the past where they have a rolling back of workplace protections. And so as a result, they're experiencing high levels of sexual harassment on the job injuries for which they don't have any redress, their ex being exposed to involvement in criminal behavior or at least criminally questionable behavior. Um, and they are very much at the mercies of the platforms and their clients.
Speaker 2 02:01 Interesting. So the book is about sort of the exploitability of temp workers or Gig workers in this sort of new gig economy.
Speaker 3 02:10 Exactly. The exploitability and about what their experiences are. And although many people say, well, you know, we've studied the informal economy before. We've always had people doing work where they're independent contractors. This is really a movement where we see many more workers getting involved with this. And we also see that the experiences that they're having are, I think even worse, the workers very much walk into this being told that this is going to be an improvement in their experience. And it's not,
Speaker 2 02:42 sorry, can you give us a taste of what people have experienced? Sort of like the, you know, the, the dark side of the Gig economy? Yes. So
Speaker 3 02:52 the shady underbelly of this work. So in terms of sexual harassment, I have workers specifically for Rabbit and for kitchen surfing because they're going into people's homes, they're working behind closed doors in private homes. They are being sexually propositioned, they are being invited to threesomes. I'm actually doing followup research right now and I'm getting stories that are even worse than what are in the book. Yes. It's not funny. It's a calling. But yeah, it's that type. Like people get so uncomfortable actually that my interviews are full of laughter cause they're telling these stories. But so in these followup interviews right now, I've got a Middle Age White Guy who tells me he was hired to shoot what he thought were head shots for somebody linked in profile and yeah, we know where this one's going. So he takes a bunch of photos and the woman doesn't seem very happy with them and she's like, well no really this is actually for my Tinder profile.
Speaker 3 03:52 And he's like, okay, so we'll shoot some like some more fun photos, not just sitting there with your arms crossed. And he takes a bunch of those and she's like, well no, actually that's still just not really like what I'm looking for. And she shows him her profile and it's all these things where she's sort of looking at the camera over a shoulder kind of flirty and he's like, okay, well then we'll take some with you jumping into leaves. And eventually it turns out that no, which she really wants her boudoir wire photos and she wants him to go back to the apartment. She gets him to go back to the apartment before telling him it's boudoir photos. And then she tells him what she's really looking for is not just an online profile photo, but really a guy like him and throws herself at him and starts touching him and he has to get himself out of this situation without offending her because she's going to write a review that's going to go on this profile that he has that's going to make it possible for him to get additional work in the future.
Speaker 2 04:55 You know that. So okay, that's an interesting part and that might be a, what distinguishes today's informal economy as it happens through platforms from the ones of yesteryear, I guess in the past had somebody groped or you know, proposition someone they could have easily just, you know, told them to f off with little or no consequence. But now the people you rebuff have a motive of taking their vengeance on you.
Speaker 3 05:20 Exactly, yes. And when they take their vengeance, if they take their vengeance, that's going to make it much harder for you to get work in the future. And in fact it could lead to you actually being kicked off of the platform if they complain to the platform. And if you look like a problem worker. So his sort of economic future is very much at risk here with this type of work.
Speaker 2 05:44 And do people make livings off of task rabbit and things like that? Are these real livings or are these, you know, is it like barely sustaining people?
Speaker 3 05:53 So that's a good question. So in the book, Gosling Gay, I actually divide workers into three categories of strugglers drivers and success stories. And the strugglers are people who have turned to Gig work as an occupation of last resort. They're very much down on their luck. This is their primary source of income and it is very much subsistence. I've interviewed people who are just using this to sort of help supplement as they empty their retirement accounts and as they wait for their social security money to come in when they hit retirement age. And then at the other end of the spectrum are the success stories. And these are the people and there are not very many of them and they're usually on Airbnb, but they are able to make really considerable incomes by renting multiple apartments and turning them into essentially airbnb hotels and they can make high five figure income corporate.
Speaker 3 06:50 That's, that's like unique capital. That's like unique capital be making that type of money. Do you have any success stories of people who only sold their labor? A couple for kitchen surfing, interestingly. So kitchen surfing. So kitchen surfing was the on demand chef service and there are actually two versions of kitchen surfing. There's the on demand where you could have a chef come to your home, uh, you'd arrange with them before 4:00 PM and they'd make you one of three price fix meals and it was super, super cheapest. $25 ahead. Wow. Yeah. And that included the chefs labor, the ingredients. They'd come with their own pots and pans to cook for you. They would cook, serve, clean up and even serve you on paper plates. You didn't have to do dishes afterwards. Wow. I pray certainly when I business cause they ran out of money.
Speaker 3 07:46 The venture capital, uh, I think a little bit of both cause people don't actually want to have to clean their kitchen in order to have what's essentially take out food. And then the other version was where they told the chefs that they could be entrepreneurs, that they could have essentially a restaurant without the hassle of actually having to hire staff and rent space in New York City. And so they were a matchmaking service where you could go online and you could contract out with a chef and you could have them do everything from an intimate dinner for two to actually catering an entire wedding and kitchen surfing would get 10% and act as an escrow service in terms of the price you were going to be paying the chef and chefs that were doing the marketplace. We're actually able to create businesses out of this. Wow.
Speaker 3 08:38 Yeah. In fact, one guy that I interview in the book is actually able to create a successful enough business that he works for a couple of weeks and then he takes two to three weeks off and travels and does whatever, and then he works for a few more weeks and he's able to make a pretty good life. The catch cause there's always a kitchen, is the kitchen surfing closed and all these chefs who had been told that they could be entrepreneurs, the kitchen surfing couldn't handle the back office, the marketing and the invoicing. Suddenly they're left with nothing. And if they want to continue their business, that's all fine and good, but they better figure out how to handle all the things that kitchen surfing told them they would never need to take care of. And now I'm actually doing followup interviews with those shafts to find out what happened to them.
Speaker 3 09:25 And if they were able to continue their entrepreneurship or of spending thousands of dollars on catering supplies and really putting all of their energy behind kitchen surfing actually allowed them to have a slow slide into precarity. But these are the typical outcomes, right? These, these success stories, what's the typical outcome? So the much more typical outcome would be the strivers individuals who are trying to this as a side hustle or as a way to supplement stagnant salaries. And these workers are, well all the workers are actually exposed to a pretty high level of risk in terms of sexual harassment, criminal involvement. But these workers are not trying to, this is their main source of income. This is sort of supplementary. And then depending on how it goes, then they might end up becoming a success story. That's often the goal. Or if things go really badly they could find themselves with very little.
Speaker 3 10:20 Did you see criminal involvement? Yes. So again, not funny, but tragedy as a defense mechanism. I am. It actually, you know, so it's good talking to you because two of the people that had the most like involvement in kind of criminally questionable activity, the sort of biggest stories in the book on this were actually sociology majors. Yes. So we need to be doing a little bit more to talk to sociology majors about like criminal deviance. So one of the ways that I got involved in doing this project was that I was an early adopter of gig workers. I was a super adjunct, I had a consulting business and I thought of myself as an entrepreneur who was hiring other entrepreneurs to help me, right? And I wasn't thinking about it very critically in terms of what type of entrepreneur wants to be entering discussion board grades.
Speaker 3 11:16 Um, but I was hiring taskrabbits to help me and I met this one task rabbit in the book and his name is Jamal. And I was like, oh, it's so great. I'm an entrepreneur and you're an entrepreneur. And he's like, Oh yeah, this task rabbit stuff is not what you think it is. And he tells me this story of getting hired. He thinks to pick up a prescription from a local pharmacy and he goes to the pharmacy and it is a pharmacy. It's a Dwayne raid. Um, not where you thought this was going, but on the way to the pharmacy, the woman informed him that she's picked up and moved to China rather suddenly and forgot to pick up her prescription medications. And he gets to the pharmacy and picks up the prescription. There's a lot of back and forth because her credit cards not working cause she's out of the country and it turns out it's a large vulva and Pheta means which is a controlled substance.
Speaker 3 12:10 And he's like, okay, and she wants him to mail this to China and you're not allowed to mail prescription medications across international borders. I don't even know if you're supposed to do it to masterfully actually, unless you're a pharmacy service. Right. And she also doesn't want him to fill out the customs form either. So there are all these weird things going on and he reaches out to task rabbit and the person's like, oh, you know, we'd never heard of this. Let me call you back, calls back and says, you know what the task or does with the task is told to do. The customer is right. You should go and mail this.
Speaker 2 12:46 Wow. Yeah. Well I don't know. We need to get into why, what happened after?
Speaker 3 12:50 I mean, no, he ends up eventually just carrying the drugs around for a good week in New York City. And hoping that he doesn't get stopped by the cops because how is he going to explain having somebody else's medicine in his pocket?
Speaker 2 13:04 What a failure on task rabbits part two? No. Do any of these services care about the wellbeing of their workers or is this just pure exploitation when you, you know, in the final analysis
Speaker 3 13:17 depends on who you talk to. Right. Um, so according to taskrabbit, they have policies with, this would never happen. It's been a couple of years. So all of these platforms tell workers that if they find themselves in an uncomfortable situation, if they're asked you something illegal, they should just end the task and leave the experience and contact the platform. But that type of stance really ignores what's going on with most of these workers, which is by the time they get a task, there's been usually some back and forth with the client. Then they've traveled to the client, they've maybe filled up an entire day or sort of blocked out an entire day to do a particular task or Gig. And then they get there and it's not what they think it's going to be. And if they complain to the platform, they might get paid for an hour of time, where as they were maybe planning to get paid for six hours worth of time. And so there's really a huge investment. By the time the workers find themselves in these situations and so they could leave. But for a lot of them, this is a choice where there's not really much of a choice to be made. And so they just have to plug through it.
Speaker 2 14:26 Like, I mean, you could see the, you know, the, the heart and critic being like, well, quit, why don't you quit?
Speaker 3 14:34 Right? Um, yeah. Why not quit? Right. I mean, for a lot of these workers, it doesn't feel like there are too many other options out there. Um, for a lot of times they've been told by the platform that this is flexibility, this is the tradeoff. You know, you work as in pen a contract, you don't have certain protections, but we'll give you flexibility and they're hearing that there are no other jobs that offer flexibility. And for some of them that might be the case. I mean if you're a faculty member, we have a level of flexibility, but we also kind of don't and we have probably some of the most flexible jobs in the u s but if you want to take a three week vacation in the middle of October,
Speaker 4 15:14 but you know it's like on another level we have a plum job cause we're protected by regulations. We're pretty convinced what we're doing is legal. We have a good self. When you talk to these people, did you get a sense that this was their only option or do you think it was like a prison of their mind? Kind of?
Speaker 3 15:33 Yeah. Well that's a really good question. For some of them I think it was the only option. So I interviewed a considerable number of workers that were actually older, so predominantly millennial, but about, I think it's 20% or so of my workers end up being over 50 and so they're definitely experiencing age discrimination. They're experiencing a harder time getting other jobs. Right now I'm doing followup research and it's, so, one of the workers I interviewed for the book was in his late forties he had a phd. He'd actually previously had a bestselling book. Yeah. And he's <inaudible> is very hard. He had worked as a pretty prestigious universities and he's delivering cronuts through croissant doughnuts, through taskrabbit. And when I interviewed him four years ago, he says, Oh yeah, this is just a temporary thing. You know, maybe I'll write, maybe I'll do a blog on this.
Speaker 3 16:33 The stories I can tell and followed up with him. Four years later, he's still doing task rabbit and he actually now addicted to it. He's addicted to the flexibility that it promises, even though it's a bit of a mirage, there is a level of flexibility and he's addicted to the fact that every time his phone goes off, there's a possibility for money, for adventure, for an interesting experience to meet someone new. He likes it even as he doesn't like it, even as he does think that it's a problem. You know, people don't talk about being addicted to vegetables, right? So when you use the word addicted, there's something else going. A sense that
Speaker 4 17:18 this flexibility was something that people needed more than wanted. Did you ever get a sense that this was the only type of format in which people could work because they had a difficulty like leading structured lives or it's just I'm trying to get to how people can hang on to low paid, exploited of work and not want something else with protections
Speaker 3 17:45 for some of them. Yeah. I think that they needed flexibility because there were other things in their life that they wanted to be doing or they felt like, so there was one young woman in the book quite described as being sort of Tinkerbell sized and she is doing moving jobs and she's maybe maybe five feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds and she's doing heavy lifting and scrubbing and she ends up popping painkillers in order to sleep at night and she has a college degree. Most of them have college degrees. But you yes. Yeah, very high level of education. But she's doing this because she plans to move to the Middle East to be with her boyfriend at some point and so she doesn't feel like she can get a full time job because she needs to be able to travel back and forth and see him and she wants to do these other things and so taskrabbit will let her do that.
Speaker 3 18:39 There is that level of flexibility or they're right. A couple of actors that I interviewed were, this was essentially the new version of waiting tables, but they could pick the jobs and schedule them around and they don't have to worry about shifts. But for a number of other workers, yeah, they sort of get beaten down in these kind of dead end jobs. You know, they worked for a rental center or they were working in call centers and especially after the great recession, they felt like there was, there weren't good jobs out there and there was no dependable way to make a good income and so at least this, they felt like they weren't part of it.
Speaker 4 19:19 It's just like there's a scrap of dignity. Do you think there's a dignity thing here where it's like it's the illusion of control and the illusion of being at a business person and sort of just the whole universe it's constructed around. This just gives people a chance to eat coat dignity in a way that they couldn't find. Were they waiting tables or working at McDonald's or whatever?
Speaker 5 19:42 Okay.
Speaker 3 19:42 Yes. Ish. Yeah. So there's a dignity aspect of yes, controlling their own schedule. And in some cases, at least when these platforms started having a little bit more control over saying, I don't want to do that type of work or, so you have to keep your numbers up so you have to accept about 85% of the tasks that you're offered on taskrabbit. When taskrabbit first got started, it was more of a bidding marketplace and so there'd be a variety of things and people could actually bid on them. So somebody might say, Hey, I want somebody to record a podcast for me, and you could bid what it would charge you to come with your recording equipment and do that. Now they had a pivot in 2015 and that, I think it was right around like 2015, 2016 they had a couple of pivots where they moved away from this bidding marketplace and more into serve a temp agency format and then they had some additional changes after Ikea lost those grab it.
Speaker 5 20:43 Wow. Yes it does.
Speaker 3 20:45 It's kind of a natural, when you think about Ikea Assembly, which was a large portion of the tasks on the flap. Yeah, for sure. Somebody has got to figure out how to do those are gloves, right? Yeah. So now, um, they have some additional changes and their policies have loosened a little bit, but workers still talk about, you know, this is not something they want to be doing. And we actually, I've seen in the followup research that some workers have kind of moved on and off of the platform based on whether they've been able to get full time work. So Jamal actually left the platform for a period of time, got a full time job, ended up unemployed again and after he ran out of out employment, returned to task rabbit for a period of months until he got another full time job. So we do see kind of this cycle, but in terms of the digging aspect, what's interesting is that the workers don't think of themselves as entrepreneurs. So when I ask if they're an entrepreneur, most of them laugh, they're like, I didn't create this, this, I'm just a part time worker who be treated as an employee. Feels a lot like men. Yeah.
Speaker 4 21:52 Power temping agency. When you describe it and if you have that little control, you're just sort of being issued marching orders.
Speaker 6 22:00 Yeah,
Speaker 3 22:01 yeah it is. Except temps are covered by workplace protection.
Speaker 6 22:07 So,
Speaker 3 22:09 and these workers are not. And also if your attempt, usually you're being hired to go into an office and there are other people and a lot of these workers are going to private homes and working behind closed doors and that's increasing the experience with the risk that they're having.
Speaker 4 22:24 Concept. Is this really just a new way of reframing the old temping business in a way that circumvents regulations. That's basically what it is. Oh yeah. That's a whole discursive universe about technology and whatever. And it's basically just calling an apple an orange so that apple regulations or don't apply to it basically.
Speaker 3 22:49 Exactly. And then marketing it as, because it has technology, it's cooler and therefore doesn't need those regulations because it's modern and you know the algorithms and the market will protect you. Right? Yeah. Which obviously, yes.
Speaker 4 23:03 Do you feel these are, are as innovative as people think they are? Or do you think it's, it's just old wine in new bottles, it's just, just temping.
Speaker 3 23:15 It's, yeah, it's just temping. The image that comes to mind most often when I'm doing this research is actually the image in the jungle of all of the workers or of clamoring at the gates to get in and the factory person <inaudible> or I think it's the slaughterhouse manager cause I was like, oh, I'll take you in you and you and yeah. And that's it.
Speaker 4 23:35 The daily laborers lined up at the, at the train station. And the pickup trucks come by.
Speaker 3 23:42 Yeah. Except now these day laborers are college educated and they're being told that this is not day labor. This is an opportunity to have freedom and to create your own career and everything will be fine because we just got a huge idea
Speaker 4 23:58 I do as far as helping these people. I feel like if these are transformed into regular jobs, then precisely the types of job features that your subjects seem to be interested in would, would not be offered. Like if we turned it into a regular temping agency than they'd be temps and we, you know, they'd be checking in and employees and all of that.
Speaker 3 24:22 Yeah. So I think, I think this idea that we can only have flexibility through these platforms is really dangerous. There's really nothing preventing employers from offering flexibility and I think that a lot of companies would actually have a better time keeping workers. They'd have happier workers if they offered more flexibility. So I think number one, we should have a higher level of flexibility in standard workplaces. I also don't think that these workers should be classified as independent contractors. I really think they should be classified as w two employees. You know, I have a really hard time believing that individuals that are assembling Ikea furniture, very company that's now owned by Ikea or not somewhat integral to the company's operations. You know, like let's think about this or you know, Uber wants to be a logistics and transportation platform, the goto platform for that. Well then the people who are providing transportation on your platform, how are they not integral? Um, and you know, if being an independent contractor is such an awesome opportunity for freedom and flexibility, why aren't we seeing any of the CEOs or members of the corporate team being classified as independent contractors? Maybe because it's not a great deal and they understand that, you know, we should really be revisiting this and not laying the companies, get away with this. For you, women at all,
Speaker 4 25:58 big take home insight, something that has, you know, sat with you and you know, something that you, you often think about when you think about the Gig economy.
Speaker 3 26:08 I'm so glad you asked that. So you know, one thing that comes to mind is just the level of risk that these workers have experienced. These workers were not prepared for this. In many cases, they went in thinking, oh, I'm going to be protected by a company that's getting credit card numbers and so somebody will know who I'm working with, but they're going behind closed doors. The companies really have no idea who these people are because you can set up a fake account, you can have a burner account, you can use a one of those cash cards to set up. In fact, Uber now actually offers gift certificates so you really don't have to have a credit card, and so the workers are just being exposed to this incredibly high level of risk. You know, there, I've spoken to people who've gotten injured on the job and are looking at the potential of back surgery, which might involve them being paralyzed.
Speaker 3 26:58 Yeah, we've, I've spoken to workers that have walked away from situations and been really shaken about what happened in terms of the sexual harassment, where they've walked away from situations and been like, wow, that was a really shitty situation that I was just involved with because I didn't really have any choice because the platforms don't have my back. You know, when workers are working behind closed doors in private homes, anything goes and the platforms are not transparent about those risks and they're not transparent about pay. And so we're very much setting workers up for this really awful experience and that's what people should know. I mean, this is not your parents' informal economy. If I can steal that car motto, you know, like this is, this is the wild west. There is a seriously shady underbelly to this work that we aren't paying nearly potential. Andrea Ravenel, who is joining the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill this fall. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 28:07 You've been listening to the annex sociology podcast. A special thank you to Alexandria Ravenel from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her Book Hustling Gig is published by the University of California press. We're on the web socio cast.org/annex on Twitter at Social Mannix and on Facebook, the annex sociology podcast. Our producer is with Seth Barina. I'm Joe Cohen. Thanks for listening.
