By Eric Levitz
Even at dinner, Rich Armstead stays on Task. An hour ago, the 32-year-old comedian finished assembling an IKEA bed for a woman in Brooklyn Heights. When he’s done with his cheeseburger, he’ll follow the waitress back into the kitchen of this Chelsea pub, and fix the sink’s leaking drainpipe.
“It’s a hustle, for sure,” he says, scanning his smartphone for future gigs.
Armstead is one of over 30,000 workers who sell their labor via TaskRabbit, an online marketplace where consumers can find a “Tasker” for any small job, from waiting in line to wedding photography. The platform is itself just one of a growing number of all-purpose service apps, including Handy, Fiverr, and Needto, which together make up only one sector of the ever-expanding “on-demand economy.”
Anyone in New York City with an internet connection and disposable income can instantly hire a furniture assemblyperson over Handy, personal driver via Uber, courier through Postmates, transcriptionist on Mechanical Turk, grocery shopper dispatched by Instacart, or even a pseudo-butler — to hire and coordinate all those other servants — via Alfred.
This proliferation of service platforms is a clear boon to consumers. But for workers, the development may prove a curse disguised as a blessing: by encouraging the affluent to outsource their chores, these apps create jobs, expanding opportunities for flexible, part-time work. But for those seeking stable full-time jobs, the on-demand economy is accelerating a broad divestment from such positions — along with the protections and benefits they once promised.
Last fall, 83 percent of executives said they were increasing their use of independent contractors, according to a survey by SAP and Oxford Economics. A report from MBO partners found that 17.9 million Americans worked at least 15 hours a week as independents in 2014, up 12.5 percent from 2011. In those three years, the overall U.S. workforce grew a mere 1.1 percent. The report projects the number of independent workers to grow to 24.5 million by 2019.
Firms have always had an incentive to hire temps instead of employees to avoid financing the latter’s legally-mandated regime of benefits, including social security and unemployment insurance. But outsourcing labor came with its own costs: contingent workers could prove unreliable, both in the quality of their work, and their availability to perform it. Now, the ubiquity of smartphones and algorithmic rating systems have drastically reduced those costs, allowing employers to access reputable temps with the swipe of a thumb. Companies in the on-demand economy take this shift to its logical extreme: Uber provides car service in 57 countries via a fleet of 160,000 independent contractors.
“This is a profound structural change,” says Trebor Scholz, a labor activist and professor of Media Studies at the New School. “We need job security, health insurance, maybe even childcare. But people have stopped thinking about the social standards that were once a part of regular employment. People stopped dreaming about these things.”
Yet even as they undermine the future of full-time employment, these apps are improving the lives of present day part-timers.
In a previous life, Armstead worked an office job, scheduling meetings for a pharmaceutical company. Frustrated by the monotony of the work, and the difficulty of scheduling auditions around it, he quit. After a couple months of selling tickets to comedy shows in Times Square, he took a part-time job with a furniture company in New Jersey. There, Armstead assembled beds and desks for $17 an hour. For that same work on TaskRabbit, he nets $36. And becoming a “Tasker” didn’t just bring Armstead better pay; it also provided him with insurance for on-the-job injuries, along with greater peace of mind.
“I go out, I do work, I know I’ve gotten something done,” he says. “And then I leave, and all the stress stays in that room. The work stays at work.”
But Armstead can only leave his stress at the door because $1,600 a month is enough to sustain a childless comedian who lives with his parents in Somerset, New Jersey.
“I couldn’t do this if I had dependents,” Armstead says. “For me, the work just isn’t frequent or reliable enough.”
It’s certainly possible to support a family on TaskRabbit. As the platform has widely advertised, the most active 15 percent of its contractors take home between $6,000 and $7,000 a month. But to be among the most active workers on the platform will require most to work long hours, and invest significant resources in transportation and self-promotion.
The on-demand economy’s full-time opportunities may be strenuous and spartan, but for some, they’ve also been invaluable.
In 2010, Kristy Milland’s husband was laid off and entered a prolonged period of unemployment. Medical issues prevented Milland from seeking work outside her home. If not for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, she says her family might have lost their house.
Started in 2004, AMT is among the oldest and lowest-paying of online labor marketplaces. Companies all over the world use the platform to crowdsource small cyber-tasks that require human intelligence, like transcribing audio or writing product descriptions. These tasks are divided into discrete pieces, so a lengthy transcription may be broken into five minute sections, with the completion of each paying as little as dollar.
Working 60 to 70 hours a week on the platform, Milland was eventually able to earn $6,000 a month, enough to keep her husband and daughter fed.
While grateful for the opportunity AMT provided, Milland nonetheless believes that the platform is deeply exploitative. Today, with her husband employed and her health improved, Milland is back in school, pursuing a Masters degree in psychology.
“I want a job with a paycheck, where I feel like what I’m doing is good and beneficial for the world,” she said. “Not to be sold as cheap labor, as an algorithm instead of as a person.”
Beyond the long hours and menial tasks, the life of a full-time Tasker or Turker (as AMT’s workers self-identify) is shot through with precarity. The volume of available work on both platforms can fluctuate unpredictably. And on AMT, even when work is steady, there is always the possibility that a company will deem your submission unsatisfactory, and refuse payment. The platform offers no recourse for contesting such refusals, even if the company ultimately uses the “rejected” work.
The contingencies of crowd-sourced labor have ultimately proven a burden on the service platforms themselves. With competition rapidly increasing, Uber and Handy found that algorithms alone couldn’t guarantee their brands a uniform standard of customer service. Uber now screens and trains its drivers, and “deactivates” them if their ratings fall below targets set by local managers. Handy developed an elaborate set of rules and regulations for its cleaners, including requirements to wear the brand’s insignia, instructions for how to ask to use a client’s bathroom, and when and if it is permissible to listen to music while cleaning.
The level of control a company exerts over a worker is a key factor in the IRS’s 20-prong test of whether a worker qualifies as an employee. Uber and Handy’s attempts to have their contractors and control them too have landed both companies in court.
In March, a California judge denied Uber’s motion to dismiss the class-action lawsuit against it, rejecting the company’s claim that it was not a car service, but merely a technology platform, and finding that its drivers met enough of the criteria of employees to warrant a jury trial.
“We’ve specialized in this area for a decade and we’ve seen companies in a number of different industries try to use this model,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney for the drivers. “The cleaning industry, cable installers, strippers. In recent years, a lot of companies started arguing that it’s okay because they use smartphones to dispatch their services. We don’t really see it as anything different.”
If the legal system agrees, workers may soon enjoy an on-demand economy replete with opportunities for ad hoc gigs and stable, full-time employment. Or part-time opportunities could shrink, as the number of profitable platforms rapidly contracts. The few platforms that have already adopted traditional employment models have failed to attract the kind venture capital commanded by their contracting peers.
But for dreamers like Scholz, neither scenario would offer workers the future they deserve. He and his working group are developing strategies for promoting worker cooperatives in the platform space. They dream of an on-demand economy where Uber’s drivers build their own app, and fully share in the spoils of digital disruption. For a model, Scholz points to La’Zooz, a driver-owned ride rental service based in Tel Aviv.
For now, though, Taskers have yet to seize the means of production. And as Armstead finishes his fries, his dreams are more mundane.
“The biggest burden is the backpack,” he says, gesturing to his bag of tools. “If TaskRabbit can figure out a way to get me spa treatments? Or discounts on spa treatments? I’ll be set.”
Eric Levitz is an independent journalist based in Manhattan, and a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His work has been featured in Salon, City Limits, and Heavy. Follow him @ericlevitz on Twitter.
