Government Regulators Don’t Know How To Represent The Voice Of Gig Workers

Summary: Current regulations mandating reclassification of ‘gig’ independent contractors as employees do not represent the desires of the drivers they are intended to help. The little available polling suggests that over 70% of gig drivers want to be independent contractors but do not have any consensus about policy solutions to issues with wage guarantees and benefits. I use a variety of polling methods and direct outreach to show that rideshare drivers are strongly divided over current labor regulations and that regulators do not have a clear way to include them in the crafting of policies, partly because regulators do not know how to get opinions of part-time, temporary workers, since labor organizations typically serve mostly long-term full-time workers, which only comprise less than 20% of drivers.

“I think its unfortunate that this [is] being portrayed in the media as a David and Goliath story, with Uber and Lyft (and Doordash, etc. being the Goliaths). The problem, as I see it, is that labor laws have not kept up with changes in the workplace,” argued one commenter on the popular blog for Uber and Lyft drivers, during a heated thread about new regulations that may force tech platforms to classify drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. “If the law is to benefit the people and the people want to remain as ICs, why are laws being made to override these concerns?”

For the past few years, I’ve been investigating the political opinions of people who perform work for on-demand platforms (“gig work”). While it is difficult to know what exactly workers want, it’s exceedingly clear that current regulations do not represent citizens’ preferences.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to gauge the preferences of workers who prefer temporary, part-time work. Even though gig jobs can be essential to pay off unexpected bills or school tuition, most of these drivers don’t work long enough to form political lobbies or, in many cases, to develop informed opinions about regulations that they never expected to care about.

As a result, legislation has been based on a very narrow slice of politically motivated full-time drivers, who engage with labor groups that are designed to represent long-term workers committed to a single profession.

This post takes a deep dive into the research I’ve been doing around gig worker preferences on regulation and different ways that they might inform policymakers.

Background on worker discontent and backlash to regulation

Around 2013 when ridesharing first began picking up steam, drivers first protested in favor of the right to do gig work. Taxi’s, when they were still a dominant form of transit, staged a demonstration in front of San Francisco City Hall, demanding the app-based companies be shut down. Drivers from the app companies, including the now-defunct SideCar, aggressively clashed for the right to drive without a taxi medallion.

A few years later, without a medallion and dispatch system that artificially limited the number of drivers and their hours on the road to increase hourly wages, existing rideshare drivers began to voice complaints about declining income due to the surge in new entrants, some of whom were driving full-time — in contrast the part-time hours it was best designed for.

Even though the vast majority of drivers were part-time, Uber’s growth in the late part of the last recession enticed a different, more financially insecure demographic. The new entrants were desperate for full-time work; the more full-time workers joined, the longer the hours they needed to drive for the same pay.

To scale for the serge in available drivers, tech companies built out GPS-turn-by-turn directions to efficiently and equally distributed the available work to drivers. But, this also took away much of the decision making typically enjoyed by independent contractors.

As a result, the new software and lack of medallion system had, in practice, creating a relatively small core of drivers that relied on platforms for every decision and all of their income needs.

Between 2016–2020, disgruntled drivers organized in online forums and then in coordination with labor groups to demand protections for the kind of full-time workers they had unexpectedly become. These protests fell neatly into a new “techlash” media narrative against Silicon Valley companies.

This further emboldened critical stories and regulators to rein in large tech companies, built on the desires of their most ardent critics. One result was California AB5, which banned independent contractor relationships if a worker performed a ‘core’ function of the business. There has been swift and heated debate since the law was passed between workers who prefer contractor work and those who want to be employees.

California legislators have conceded a series of quick exemptions to improve the law, but continue to struggle over how to include voices which they are not used to listening to.

What does the polling of drivers show?

Image source: RideShareGuy

Since gig workers are a relatively small portion of the economy, it’s hard to find them. One way is to go to online forums where they gather to discuss issues.

In a survey last year by the popular gig work blog, TheRideshareGuy, somewhere between 70–80% of respondents preferred independent contractor status.

Driver comment threads on blog posts related to the surveys reveal vigorous disagreement:

“I don’t want to be an employee either. I don’t want to be in a union. I like working whenever I want. I just want to be able to set my rates, drive whatever car I want, refuse, and cancel trips as often as I want, let customers request me, etc. That’s what an independent contractor is,” wrote one commenter.

That is, behind the polling numbers, there is wide disagreement about what should be done, often not captured in any current policy proposals.

What does it mean to “represent” driver opinions and should we include potential drivers?

There is considerable disagreement over what it means to represent driver voices.

For instance, the city of San Francisco recently commissioned a survey of drivers through the Emerging Mobility Labor Study, which explicitly biased their sample towards full-time drivers, who in some cities, make up the majority of work being done (even though they are a minority of total drivers).

On the other hand, gig companies are unique in high turnover rates, since they are best designed for temporary financial needs. That means, from a democratic perspective, there are more people who will one day be drivers than are currently driving, so only polling people who currently drive excludes a large portion of the demographic that will be impacted by any policy.

How does a democracy take into account the preferences of potential workers? I conducted a small poll with Google Surveys, asking respondents about their political opinions if they say they were “somewhat likely” to work for a driver or delivery on-demand platform over the next year. Specifically, I asked, “Proposition 22 is a new ballot that would allow driver/delivery gig workers to be independent contractors with minimum wage rules. Tell us why you support or oppose Prop 22”

The vast majority of respondents had no opinion on Proposition 22. Of those that did, some answers were straightforward:

“Sounds cool”

Others were open to interpretation:

“Because ab5 is terrible”

“undecided , dont want uber to go away”

Clearly, there are a lot of people who will one day want to drive for gig companies but are unsure how to express their opinions without more knowledge.

Do gig workers have stable views?

One difficulty in translating loose polling questions into policy is that many workers, especially temporary workers, have not thought much about politics.

To address this concern, I took a page from experimental political science with “deliberative polling”, which pays respondents to read articles on a topic and polls them after they’ve had a change to thoughtfully consider all sides.

I recruited gig workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is a large pool of well established; each respondent asked to summarize articles for and against employee classification and then express if and how their view changed. One respondent said:

“My opinion changed about the ways that companies can provide their worker’s with these benefits while still keeping them in the same work format. I did not think this was really a good idea or see how it could be accomplished but after reading the first article for the legislation I have a better understanding as to how something like this could be put together while still helping workers keep their freedoms.”

One pattern I saw is that even when respondents supported employee regulations, such as AB5, they expressed reservations of its current form after learning about how it has impacted other freelancers negatively

“I think it would be better in the long run if prop 22 failed as AB5 truly benefits the worker monetarily and also gives them rights as workers. However in the short term I think that AB5 has already hurt gig workers in that some companies have been scared off from hiring California workers and have pulled their business out of the state. I know some workers lost their accounts on Appen, for example, and the loss of income was hard felt. I think there needs to be a mix of the two and there needs to be a suspension of AB 5 until a better resolution is on the table.”

Options to represent gig workers

So, if current regulations don’t represent gig workers, what should we do? One option is to suspend current regulations, such as AB5, until legislators can bring in a representative group of workers to help craft legislation.

There are a variety of methods, including citizen juries and deliberative polling, that have been used to inform policymaking on other issues.

Direct democracy, through ballot measures, such as the upcoming Prop 22 in California, may be more democratic than legislation, since there are many potential gig workers who otherwise have no connection to regulations other than when they turn out to vote.

Representing this new worker demographic is difficult and policy leaders should recognize this challenge as they propose new laws.