Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat, Humans as Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

For Curtis Larson, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate living in New York City, the gig economy worked. When he quit a salaried job as a computer programmer to become a full-time freelancer on an online platform called Gigster, he soon made as much—about $10,000 to $12,000 per month—as he had in his previous job. Curtis had newfound freedom with his schedule, like going to the gym in the middle of the day, the chance to hone new technical skills, and relief from the everyday office politics of his old job. The risks that he took on were mitigated by a remarkable amount of due diligence: he had saved a year’s worth of expenses, consulted an accountant about increased taxes, planned retirement savings on a spreadsheet, and found a health insurance plan that would not deplete his savings. After two years as an independent contractor in the gig economy, Curtis was offered a dream job: a salaried programming position for Elon Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft company in Arizona. As Sarah Kessler writes in Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work, “This was the gig economy that its boosters described, and Curtis proved that it could indeed work out wonderfully” (68).Kessler strategically places the experience of Curtis alongside those of three other individuals in the gig economy: a Toronto high school drop-out who turned to online crowd work out of desperation, a Kansas City restaurant server turned Uber driver, and a Sunday School teacher in Arkansas who hoped the gig economy could resurrect workforce development in his small town. The stories that Kessler tells are hard to forget. The online crowd worker slept in her home office at night so as not to miss any alarms for the better-paying jobs listed on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web platform. The Uber driver felt tricked by the company when his attempts to earn a minimum wage failed. The Sunday School teacher’s most promising recruit was Gary, a father of eight who lived in a trailer and worked as a virtual call center contractor for a small company that contracted with a big customer service company that contracted with Sears. Gary was obligated to do a month’s worth of training without pay and then keep his schedule open for thirty hours of work each week but was only paid for the actual hours that one of the contract ing companies decided he should work. Kessler writes: “There’s no cushion between those people and a total free fall” (185).Gigged sets up Curtis as a foil, and a useful one, to these telling stories of the poor North American working class. The last story that the book tells is about redemption. Kessler traces the history of how a start-up company in New York City divorced its Silicon Valley roots to become the “anti-Uber” (143). The start-up’s switch from a model based on independent contractors to one that relies on employees creates a glimpse of a future with stable schedules, decent pay, and reasonable protections that together might amount to a social safety net. As Kessler points out in the standout chapter 7, workers place little value on flexibility when given options for stable schedules and pay. Kessler is explicit: “The gig economy, it turns out, is not the on-demand improvement to the ‘future of work’ that its creators once imagined. But it will play an important role in exemplifying what that future might look like” (250).What sets the book apart is not only its beautiful prose. Kessler intertwines the individual life stories of Curtis and others with regular references to studies and reports about increasing economic inequality, incorrect classification of all types of workers, “deteriorating retirement savings programs, weakening support for unemployed workers, and declining health benefits” (183). Of Uber, she writes, it “merely took a trend among corporations—employing as few people as possible—and adapted it for the smartphone era” (9). It is this kind of engagement with existing scholarship, and the acknowledgment that the gig economy is merely the newest manifestation in a long line of erosions to workers’ rights that makes the book essential reading for students of labor history.Gigged reads as an analysis about what the gig economy has meant for the lives of the contemporary working class. The welcome surprise at the book’s end is its cutting analysis of the role of journalism in the gig economy’s rise. Kessler, a journalist herself, is critical of her profession’s involvement in turning such a blind eye to the realities of online and app-distributed low-wage work. She tracks how portable benefits got “vaulted” into the Wall Street Journal and, in doing so, spread the unsubstantiated claim that gig economy companies provide work that is “valuable and worth protecting” (192–93).Where Gigged focuses on the lives of workers, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work zeroes in on the shiny technology at the center of the gig economy: the Uber app. Alex Rosenblat emerges through Uberland as an expert on the ride-hailing industry’s technology: how it works, what it tracks, and why it can make the job so difficult for drivers. She dissects the information asymmetries and constant surveillance that beset Uber’s chauffeur services:Uber employs a type of workplace surveillance that contradicts its claims that it has a “hands off” management style. For example, the app displays a safe-driving report with two categories, Smooth Breaks and Smooth Accelerations. One driver had smooth breaks 219/264 times, and the app displayed the message “Several harsh breaks detected” (139).This big brother–style management goes further. Drivers can “unknowingly be sent on a non-optimal route in order to generate data for the data-centric system on the road less traveled” (133). Technology is “the language of power” that Uber exercises over its drivers (115). The algorithms that undergird the Uber app do not provide objective data analysis of supply and demand. As Rosenblat meticulously shows, the algorithms can manipulate drivers and leave them susceptible to financial risks and expenses associated with “unprofitable dispatches” (94).The relationship that the Uber app shapes is not just the one that emerges between driver and company. The app’s rating system revolutionizes the relationship between driver and passenger. Uberland documents how Uber transforms a chauffeured passenger into a middle manager “responsible for evaluating worker performance” (149). The dangers of this twist are twofold: Uber’s rating system means that “consumers can directly input their biases into worker evaluation systems” (155). Moreover, it pushes a slippery vision about the legal status of drivers—namely that they are providing a service to the passengers rather than for Uber. This idea about how employment is arranged in digital spaces replete with algorithmic power and transparency is contentious and the subject of current debate in California about a state bill to address misclassification of employees in the gig economy. Rosenblat, in one of the book’s biggest contributions, explains how Uber advances this vision of workers as consumers. Uber, she argues, “confuses categories such as innovation and lawlessness, work and consumption, algorithms and managers, neutrality and control, sharing and employment” (9).When Rosenblat turns her attention from the app to drivers themselves, the empirical rigor with which she approaches the research fades. On the one hand, she acknowledges that drivers overestimate their earnings, and it may take them months to figure out their expenses or actual earnings. On the other, she seems to take drivers at their word. She presents as true, for instance, a driver’s claim that he makes more in one week driving for Uber after expenses than he did every two weeks at Walmart. Her stories are thin when it comes to workers’ lives. Too often she asserts rather than shows: “For some drivers, this job is a millstone, and for others, it’s a life preserver or stopgap solution to income security” (75). Where is the data to support this claim that the job can be a life preserver or important stopgap? There are other examples: “[F]or some the steady and reliable fares from Uber beat the realities of unemployment that others face in a precarious job market, such as waiting in line at job fairs with hundreds of job applicants for ten or twelve open positions” (80). Is there evidence, be it stories or data, to support this statement? Though Rosenblat, a self-described technology ethnographer, reports that she conducted some of the 125 interviews for the book while a passenger in a chauffeured car, she surprisingly does not discuss the possibility of coercion. She leaves hanging in the air the possibility that the rating system may have clouded the data that she collected from drivers.Rosenblat’s examination of Uber is incisive and at times ground-breaking. Her conclusions, by contrast, are fuzzy. Uberland does not seem to know how to respond to the question of “So what?” Rosenblat writes, “It remains an open question whether the new norms Uber ushers in are better or worse for labor and for consumers” (207). She waffles back and forth on the implications of her findings: “Perhaps Uber’s creative destruction will unlock some breakthrough in social inclusion in the future of technology” (196). At a different point in the text, Rosenblat gestures toward a “broad social benefit” of Uber’s digital platform (133). This wavering on what Uber means for workers, cities, and society at large weakens the book, but it provides a useful contribution to the inner workings of the gig economy.Where Gigged is pessimistic about the gig economy and Uberland is undecided, Jeremias Prassl’s Humans as Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy is unabashedly optimistic. His book begins with such a premise: “The gig economy has great potential” (7). He believes that through the application of employment law and adoption of full employment rights, the gig economy can “work for all” (133) and its “truly innovative elements” can “flourish” (91). The author states up front that “the gig economy’s hidden workers are the central focus of this book” (6), but that seems hardly the case. The central concern of Humans as Service is the possibility that the gig economy is not playing by the rules, and that such digressions will have lasting impacts on entrepreneurialism, productivity, growth, markets, and “genuine competition” (133). For Prassl, not playing by the rules means that Silicon Valley companies are misclassifying workers as independent contractors rather than recognizing them as employees. Prassl’s concern with this practice is that it may disincentivize investment in research and entrench existing companies against future competitors. He writes, “cheap labour incentivizes the very opposite of genuine innovation” (85). The point is not that full employment rights are humane but that they have market appeal, an argument that might resonate with a business school audience.Chapter 5 offers a scan of how different legal systems across the world contend with the classification of gig workers. In it, Prassl tries to dismantle the myth that “employment rights are inherently incompatible with flexibility” (117) with references to Australia, where casual workers are paid at a higher rate to compensate for insecurities, and to Poland, which makes all work, regardless of worker status, subject to minimum wages. The book sees more success in chapter 4, which makes the important point that the gig economy’s business model of large taskforces, powerful intermediaries, and poor working conditions has centuries’ worth of historical antecedents. The gig economy is a “digital reincarnation of old employment models” (87). Though the chapter, and the text more generally, is richly cited and deeply entwined in existing scholarship, the argument that work has not really changed over time is not supported. Humans as Service is full of sentences that begin with “most platforms” or “another common tactic.” Prassl offers a bird’s-eye view and brushes with broad strokes. Not a bad perspective; it is just not a very engaging one, especially alongside Gigged or Uberland.Nonetheless, the book’s rigorous citations make the text a useful one for scholars concerned with the gig economy. Where Uberland is light on engagement with other sources, Humans as Service is refreshingly heavy. It was here that I finally found the specific source (a McKinsey report) for a claim that 70 percent of workers join the gig economy by choice. Other gems include the findings that Uber’s ride-hailing services do not coincide with a reduction in drunk driving and that Uber tracks the cell phone battery levels of passengers since passengers, it turns out, are more likely to accept surge pricing when battery levels are low. Prassl also provides one of the best summaries of Uber’s plagued auto-leasing program. Though not the star of the growing crowd of literature about the gig economy, Humans as Service is a timely testament to the subject’s far reach and staying power.