The gig diseconomy
The erosion of economic and social principles in 21st-century capitalism through the eyes of an undercover journalist.
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, James Bloodworth, Atlantic Books, 288 pages, £12.99
You’re leaving the bar with your mates and it’s late at night, so you decide use an app to call a cab. “Don’t worry,” you tell your friends. “I’ll hire a private driver through an exchange facilitated via a third-party platform.” They look at you, confused.
This degree of precision, which Uber espouses in its corporate documents and treatment of drivers, exposes the divergence that the so-called “gig economy” embodies. On the one hand, innovative firms transform markets and language itself, turning a foreign adjective into a noun and verb. One brand can become globally synonymous for an entire industry and business model. On the other, these companies seek to remain ethereal, with as few obligations as possible.
To wade into this Orwellian world first-hand, you will hardly find a better companion than James Bloodworth’s Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. Through his journey Bloodworth, a journalist, dons the worn shoes of an Amazon warehouse picker, the nursing garb of a homecare worker, a buzzing headset at a call center, and the rental car of an Uber driver in an exploration of what it means to live on a minimum wage in 21st-century England and Wales. The result is an exposé of how powerful firms disregard economic principles for profit and of how the gig economy is twisting the fabric of British society as observed from within its stretching, fraying seams.
In conventional thinking all economic actors, including large corporations, should follow a set of economic principles. Consistently, however, Bloodworth finds that firms like Amazon and Uber warp these laws to increase profit at the direct cost of their staff and society.
Take Uber’s drivers, who are nominally self-employed. While they can choose when to work, once they turn on the app they are forced to take runs assigned by the algorithm without regard to whether these jobs are economically worthwhile. As Bloodworth notes, the app is no longer an intermediary but an employer that mandates drivers’ tasks and income.
In contrast, Amazon keeps workers at arm’s length by staffing its warehouses through agencies. It is possible for those who persevere to last long enough (nine months) to be hired directly by Amazon, but they must first run the gauntlet of physically taxing work, arbitrary penalties, and unreliable pay.
Bloodworth tells of frequent episodes when his and his colleagues’ minimum-wage paychecks were handed out with gross underpayments. If Amazon is an icon of logistical and corporate efficiency, that doesn’t apply to its labor suppliers, who are able to maintain their position as rent-seeking intermediaries despite woeful personnel-management practices.
If a worker doesn’t receive their due, they effectively subsidize their employer. Companies like Uber or Deliveroo, a food-delivery firm, also shift business risk to their contractors by enticing an oversupply of drivers and riders. The firms’ objective is to provide customers with a service as reliable as opening the faucet for water. Yet when demand is low, drivers and riders sit idle. Since they are paid by the ride and not by the hour, they bear the costs of artificial oversupply. Uber’s claims that its algorithm is a tool to match supply with demand efficiently may seem true to consumers, but it rings hollow to drivers.
This pursuit of “reliability” derives from Uber’s monopolistic ambition to become a transportation utility. However, monopolies like those that supply water and electricity are tightly regulated, with governments setting the maximum costs and profits that operators can extract. Companies like Uber aspire to monopoly status but will predictably fight tooth and nail to avoid the responsibilities and rules that come with it.
Corporations’ contempt for their social and economic responsibilities isn’t new. Through his travels in Britain’s former coal country, Bloodworth describes how mining tycoons disregarded the health and lives of their employees. Modern-day jobs at call centers and warehouses may have swapped physical danger for tediousness, but they have also throttled workers’ prospects for creating stable lives and families. The estrangement from society of Bloodworth’s colleagues also contrasts with former miners’ pining for their bygone vibrant communities, if not for their jobs in the pits.
It may be that miners forged a bond by being the generations that “defeated the Kaiser and Hitler,” or through their struggle for workers’ rights. Indeed, Bloodworth’s recommendation for improving labor’s lot today is to bring unions and workplace democracy to the gig economy. The proposal has merit, but it is also incomplete. Whether the dire conditions of Britain’s modern workforce stem from poor labor legislation or from its inadequate enforcement remains an unanswered question. Moreover, the author doesn’t define the “gig economy,” and lumps together different categories of workers that might benefit from different remedies.
Despite such shortcomings, Hired provides ample food for thought on the future of Western states. Bloodworth remarks that he “[…] set out to write about the changing nature of work, but this is also a book about the changing nature of Britain.” In 21st-century Western capitalism, the erosion of economic and social principles go hand in hand.
