Here is an irony: the “gig economic system” is a statistical black gap. Staff, clients and regulators know little or no about probably the most primary elements of it: how a lot staff receives a commission, for instance, or a lot unpaid time on the clock a employee places in earlier than they get a job from the app.
The explanation that is ironic is that the “gig economic system” is dominated by a handful of large, data-driven companies that know the exact, up-to-the-second reply to those questions. The issue is that they will not share the information. After all, staff and clients have the information, too, however our knowledge is broadly subtle, with every employee and every buyer solely representing a single, infinitesimal pixel on this large image.
Most of our industry-wide figures concerning the sector come from painstaking, costly survey work. The expense and energy concerned in conducting this evaluation implies that the general public’s understanding of the gig firms’ enterprise is fragmentary and skinny.
However each once in a while, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the total image. A kind of glimpses was captured by David Weil, the previous labor requirements boss on the US Division of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Legal professional Basic sued Uber over employee misclassification, with Weil serving as an professional witness, who was capable of entry the uncooked knowledge on Uber’s enterprise operations.
In a brand new American Prospect longread referred to as “The Harmful Delusion of Flexibility,” Weil builds on the general public document developed within the case to demolish the central fable of the gigwork firms: that they enter right into a mutually useful association with their staff by providing “flexibility” that lets staff “select work that matches the rhythms of their lives, not the opposite approach round”:
https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/
This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber govt who has led the corporate’s efforts to formalize its employee misclassification program, notably California’s Prop 22, a $225m statewide marketing campaign that overturned the state’s landmark gig work requirements. West can be Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, and he served as her marketing campaign’s company liaison, senior strategist and financial coverage advisor.
On its face, West’s assertion sounds affordable, and most of us have heard a model of it, probably even from an Uber driver. However what Uber calls “flexibility” is known as a approach for the corporate to dump its operational dangers onto its drivers.
Anybody who runs a enterprise has to handle a key operational danger: staffing ranges. A restaurateur who would not schedule sufficient cooks, bussers and servers may need to show away enterprise on the door if there is a rush. But when the restaurateur schedules too many individuals for a shift, they’re going to find yourself paying for these staff to face round scrolling Tiktok.
In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that permits restaurateurs to switch this danger onto their workers: the “tipped minimal wage.” Federally, the minimal wage for tipped workers is just $2.13/hour, with the caveat that workers are obliged to “high up” their staff’ pay if the information from their shift do not add as much as $7.25/hour. So in the event you work 5 hours and do not wait on a single desk, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). However you probably have a busy shift and also you make $40 in ideas, your boss solely has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimal).
It is a switch of danger from bosses to staff. The boss can schedule further servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come by means of the doorways. In case your boss overestimates the quantity of enterprise, a lot of the price of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.
That is fairly a candy deal for bosses. In any case, servers have just about no management over the quantity of enterprise a restaurant attracts. It is the boss, not the server, who decides the place the restaurant will likely be, which hours it’s going to maintain, which meals it’s going to serve, how a lot the meals prices, what ads to run, and the place and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, employees apparel and the music. They make the selections, and staff pay the value in the event that they resolve poorly.
For many companies, staff are much less uncovered to dangers from their boss’s strategic errors. In case your boss screws up, you may see a decrease annual bonus, or take a profession hit because of the dangerous firm’s presence in your CV. After all, in case your boss actually messes up they may lay you off or exit of enterprise altogether, nevertheless it’s a uncommon enterprise that will get to externalize its dangers onto its staff on a shift-by-shift foundation the best way eating places get to.
However as candy as restaurateurs have it, that is nothing in comparison with the unbelievable deal that gig platforms get. Corporations like Uber and Lyft get to shift almost all their danger to their staff, after which insist that they are doing staff a favor by providing them “flexibility.” Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft management all of the mechanisms by which the variety of riders is about. They resolve find out how to promote and find out how to value their rides. When a driver indicators on and makes themselves out there – at no cost – to Uber, it’s the firm’s actions, not the motive force’s, that decide whether or not that driver will get a job, and the way a lot they’re going to receives a commission.
Uber and Lyft declare that drivers have management, too – when (if) they’re supplied a job, they get to resolve whether or not to take it. That is true, nevertheless it’s extra sophisticated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to resolve whether or not to simply accept a job, which suggests they’ve 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based fee on supply, all whereas working a automobile in site visitors. Drivers who settle for lowball presents danger having their base pay completely eroded by means of “algorithmic wage discrimination,” which is when the gig platforms infer that staff who settle for very low wages are economically determined and may be supplied even decrease wages sooner or later:
https://pluralistic.internet/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
However staff cannot merely refuse presents and look forward to the wage on supply to extend. That enhance could occur, but when a driver is just too choosy, the platform will punish them for turning down too many presents by excluding them from future alternatives. If this occurs typically sufficient, the motive force could find yourself broke sufficient to begin accepting these lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their anticipated earnings.
That is “flexibility,” however largely it is flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver will get paid, and so they management the information about that cost. This enables Uber to say to be paying nicely north of minimal wage, whereas drivers common lower than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its data asymmetry to publish solely the numerator (the quantity a driver makes when a passenger is within the automobile) whereas hiding the denominator (what number of hours it takes for Uber to place a passenger in that automobile):
https://pluralistic.internet/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible
Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that permits it to dangle simply sufficient cash in entrance of drivers to maximise their quantity on the street, regardless of what number of riders are searching for vehicles. The truth that they’ve all the data (whereas drivers have none) permits them to extract huge quantities of completely unpaid labor from these drivers. After which, as soon as a passenger will get within the automobile, Uber’s informational programs let it pay that driver absolutely the minimal they may settle for for the journey.
After all, it really works the identical approach for passengers, every of whom is obtainable a distinct value for a similar rides, based mostly on the corporate’s surveillance knowledge and its realtime calculations about how a lot the rider is prepared to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares have been linked (the identical approach a server’s ideas and the price of a meal are linked). As we speak, these are totally decoupled. Uber runs a sort of cod-Marxist operation the place staff are paid based on their desperation, and passengers are gouged based on their capacity to pay:
https://pluralistic.internet/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor
This works so nicely (for Uber) that Uber has launched a aspect hustle promoting algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination programs to firms in different sectors, so anticipate this association to contaminate ever-wider swathes of the economic system:
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/information/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Information-Platform-to-Energy-Subsequent-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Wants/default.aspx
(And that is neither right here nor there, however holy shit, is Uber’s investor relations website critically serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ referred to as and it needs its Clinton-era antitrust proof again!)
Again to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing association units Uber other than different platforms the place sellers supply non permanent use of their property to consumers. As Weil writes, at the least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly fee recommended by the platform (although I would add that the platforms will downrank and bury individuals who resist their recommendations).
As Weil factors out, even when Uber needed to pay the minimal wage and assume different operational dangers related to operating a enterprise, they’d nonetheless have entry to those algorithmic instruments, albeit with totally different parameters. Quite than setting the wage flooring for drivers at $0/hour, they’d need to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimal wage, or extra, relying on the state). This could power the corporate to refuse shifts to drivers when there have been sufficient staff on the street to deal with demand, however drivers would profit from this association – relatively than driving round for a shift, burning gasoline and placing put on in your automobile with out getting paid, Uber would simply inform you to remain dwelling.
Uber might attempt to offload these dangers onto passengers, however keep in mind, Uber is already charging riders a customized value based mostly on large troves of surveillance knowledge that’s constantly re-analyzed to guess the most important sum you are prepared to pay for any given journey. You are already paying the very best value Uber can set for you, in different phrases.
Weil has been in lots of boards – together with that Massachusetts courtroom – the place Uber touted its “flexibility” as a profit to drivers. However as he exhibits, Uber might supply all the identical flexibility to drivers with out the draw back danger of driving round for hours with out incomes a dime. Certain, forcing Uber and Lyft to increase rights and protections that each worker will get would elevate their prices – however “the identical is true for any firm having to adjust to employment regulation and work protections.”
Outdoors of the US, these firms are being compelled to shift the danger from their staff’ backs to their very own steadiness sheets. As Weil writes, the UN’s Worldwide Labor Group has set binding labor requirements for gig firms, referred to as Conference 193, “Respectable Work within the Platform Financial system”:
The US authorities is pulling out all of the stops to stop these requirements from being utilized to US gig firms, even overseas. Trump’s labor boss Keith Sonderling informed the world that the US authorities “won’t sit on the sidelines whereas some international governments push to hamper American innovation within the gig economic system worldwide”:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/
However, as Weil says, this is not about innovation, flexibility or AI. It is about gig firms altering the distributional final result of entire sectors, to shift cash from staff to traders.
The remainder of the world has its personal concepts. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court docket discovered that gig firms’ companies have been unlawful and ordered them to increase regular labor protections to gig staff. Naturally, the gig firms simply ignored the regulation and continued to screw these staff. Gig staff, as famous, are subtle. They do not work in the identical place. They don’t have any solution to discover out who else works for a similar boss as they do. The identical components that maintain us from gathering stats on gig work additionally retains gig staff from evaluating notes on how they’re getting shafted.
What’s a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom got here up with an ingenious resolution. They partnered with a well-liked, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the supply platforms, after which positioned orders for tons of pizzas by means of the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They reworked the pizzeria right into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing dialog with each rider the corporate dispatched to the restaurant:
That is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing needn’t cease there. Corporations like Para have proven how, by jailbreaking the apps utilized by gig staff, they will enable these staff to comparability store for the very best wage. Quite than getting 15 seconds whereas navigating site visitors to resolve whether or not a job is value taking, drivers and riders might use a “counter-app” that evaluates all of the presents on all of the platforms and coordinates with different staff to mass-reject lowball presents:
https://pluralistic.internet/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app
The one drawback is the “anticircumvention” legal guidelines that criminalize this sort of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These legal guidelines make it a literal crime to alter how an app operating by yourself telephone works. These legal guidelines have been invented in America, with 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, however within the ensuing years, the US Commerce Rep has used the specter of tariffs to power each nation on the earth to undertake their very own anticircumvention legal guidelines. By caving into US bullying, all of America’s buying and selling companions have left their staff and customers weak to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the nice good thing about the US tech firms which have fused with the Trump regime.
That is the hidden silver lining to Trump’s lunatic tariffs: they take away the menace that stored all these US-protecting international IP legal guidelines in power. When somebody threatens to burn your home down except you do as you are informed, after which they burn your home down anyway, you actually do not need to maintain complying:
https://pluralistic.internet/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
The chances for counterapps in gig work are limitless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops fee “Tuyul” apps that mod their dispatch apps in methods small (upsizing the font) and enormous (spoofing the GPS):
https://pluralistic.internet/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
In his article, Weil cites a research displaying that clients for gig apps have a tendency to not comparability store – when you select your default taxi-hailing app, that turns into your go-to. However with counter-apps, your default might be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all of the platforms and chooses the most cost effective one, forcing the gig firms to compete with one another:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723
The platforms prefer to pitch themselves as “frictionless,” however the actuality is that they do not cut back friction a lot as reallocate it. As a result of they management the know-how, as a result of the regulation makes it a literal crime to wrestle that management away, they will shift all of the friction from their aspect of the ledger to yours, whether or not you are a employee or a buyer:
https://pluralistic.internet/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution
Tony West is not mendacity when he says Uber values flexibility – they worth their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, authorized) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.
#20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction journey https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/
#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://internet.archive.org/internet/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412
#10yrsago Empirical proof that Phrases of Service are “the most important lie on the Web” https://internet.archive.org/internet/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/
#10yrsago Fox’s worker contracts could imply Gretchen Carlson won’t ever get her day in court docket https://internet.archive.org/internet/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/
#10yrsago To see the longer term, go to probably the most distant areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141
#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Enjoyable Household”: good outdated American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/
#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to maintain billions https://pluralistic.internet/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions
“The Reverse-Centaur’s Information to AI,” a brief e-book about being a greater AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
“Canny Valley”: A restricted version assortment of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.internet/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
“Enshittification: Why Every part Immediately Acquired Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
“Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Purple Group Blues,” concerning the heroic period of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
“The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Purple Group Blues,” about prison-tech and different grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
“The Misplaced Trigger:” a solarpunk novel of hope within the local weather emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
“The Web Con”: A nonfiction e-book about interoperability and Massive Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Guide Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/e-book/9781804291245).
“Purple Group Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that can go away you understanding extra about how the world works than you probably did earlier than.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: How one can Beat Massive Tech, Tame Massive Content material, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on find out how to unrig the markets for inventive labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“The Publish-American Web,” a geopolitical sequel of kinds to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
“Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel tailored from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
“Enshittification, Why Every part Immediately Acquired Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
“The Memex Methodology,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
As we speak’s high sources:
Presently writing: “The Publish-American Web,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” concerning the higher world the remainder of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft accomplished. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother brief story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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