The people writing about whether gig work is exploitative have usually never competed for a restaurant shift. The people most helped by a new tech are often the least represented in policy debates.
A contributor to this coverage is also how unions want to cover it. There was a world, maybe still exists, to improve uber drivers working conditions by forcing the apps to actually treat them fully as independent contractors- tell the driver where the end of the ride is before they accept it and all other info the drivers want so they can make an informed decision before they take the ride. Also by advocating they get more of the fare.
But unions don’t actually want drivers to be independent contractors they want to them to be employees because that’s the kind of worker unions know how to represent.
Ridesharing companies want the best of both worlds. They want the control over workers that having employees give them, but they want the lack of responsibility that having independent contractors gives them. So a few years ago, when this was new and the workers were in the worst of both worlds, there was an advocacy choice – if they became more Like either thing, then their conditions would improve. There was no organized effort to get them to be real independent contractors. The organized effort was to make them be more like employees. Which makes perfect sense unions exist to organize employees.
That organized effort means that the public discourse focuses on the things that the workers don’t have that employees do have – predictable schedules, healthcare, minimum wage. If there was an effort to make them more like independent contractors, then the discourse would have focused on the things that independent contractors have that they don’t have – Full knowledge of the job they’re being offered before they take it, a higher cut of the fare.
My thanks to Abi for the excellent article. I think the issues Sonja raises are central, and deserve elaborating. First, the promise of TNCs circa 2014 was so exciting: an enormous expansion in the ability of any adult to sell their own labor in a way that puts them in control. Have a complicated personal life that doesn’t fit with most shift schedules? Health issues that make your availability highly unpredictable? TNC driving routes right around those brutal blockers to getting a normal job. So far so fantastic.
Unfortunately, there are two big structural problems that make the work worse than waiting tables or ad hoc vending. First, you are driving your car. That means you are sitting, breathing exhaust, and risking crashes as you earn. You are also sharply depreciating the value of your capital investment. I do not believe most TNC drivers accurately account for those harms, risks, and costs. Second, as Sonja documents, the TNC companies are extraordinarily aggressive about extracting all of the value in the system and pushing all of the costs onto labor. They employ hundreds of data scientists who squeeze as much money from the system as they can, framing driver earnings as lost revenue to be captured.
Thanks Sam and Sonja! I agree with both of you. Based on my research, Uber/Lyft are getting to take a larger cut of fares! Compared to earlier in their history and compared to competitors. A competitor app Empower (where drivers get 100% of fare but *drivers* pay a monthly fee) is even trying to get a bill passed that would allow individuals to register as self-employed business of private hire drivers in DC so they can get their own liability insurance, and do the things that truly private contractors do. There’s definitely ways to operate TNCs that give drivers more clarity and control.
Unless you're driving a collectable classic, your car is not a capital investment (which one anticipates will gain in value) but an investment of capital (virtually all cars depreciate in value over time--even if you don't drive them).
Thank you for discussing this phenomenon. I saw a Threads post of people shaming someone for working at DoorDash as their main source of income and was instantly angry. The Pragmatic Engineer also recently released an update about how the Reddit post on an alleged UberEats whistleblower was completely Ai generated and people still thought it was justified because “it’s ok to fake evidence if it’s believable”. These double standards are frustrating and I wish more people realized how damaging it is for the same communities they claim to fight for.
So I couldn’t I stop thinking about your comment, and people shaming someone for getting their main income from DoorDash. Why was it considered shameful?
Here is a link to the full thread, it seems as if people were saying that there were “better systems”, without really giving a real solution or alternative.
ugh unfortunately I'm not even shocked by the financial shaming, but the AI whistleblower and "better systems" comment point displays the ultimate rich-blindness. it's the classic money whisper, the quiet, systemic lie we tell ourselves to feel like the good guys even when we’re ignoring the community’s actual reality. Spot on, and honestly, a bit devastating.
Great post! I'm surprised that there are only 1m minimum wage earners -- that's way smaller than I would have guessed. I assume a lot of people are earning local minimum wage. I dunno how different that is in practice -- maybe in some places that's a pretty similar lifestyle due to the salary being similar, and/or due to cost disease eating up the difference?
Wikipedia says "In January 2020, almost 90% of Americans earning the minimum wage were earning more than the federal minimum wage due to local minimum wages". If that still holds, that means approx 10m people are on _some_ minimum wage, but only 1m of those are on federal minimum.
The figure I have seen is about 40% of the workforce earns $20/hr or less. The prevailing entry-level wage around here (West Michigan) is about $14-15 or so (state minimum is $13.73).
My experience with DoorDash has been that I typically make about $20/hr and slightly more with Uber. But my occasional forays into the metroplex 50 miles away is that I can make close to $30 there with Uber.
This is such an excellent point. I didn’t even think to check out local minimum wages. I also wonder whether it’s pretty similar lifestyle or whether they vary *that* much. Including local minimum wages makes the number a lot bigger. This is really helpful for my future research Ashwin, thanks for this.
I totally agree people who have not experienced actually doing normal entry-level or non-traditional work tend to not understand it.
I once worked as a vendor at a baseball stadium. You had to front the cash to buy the inventory, and there was no wage at all — earnings depended one hundred percent on how many items you sold. But I loved that job, because I could hustle and make about a hundred bucks in a two hour shift. I was many years past college before I did anything that could net fifty bucks an hour again. That wasn’t exploitation, that was awesome flexibility.
Whoa, that’s a really cool example. I didn’t think of jobs that make you front expenses! Selling Avon works like that sometimes.
I’m starting to wonder whether we single out tech platforms for just being particularly visible and/or for having small, high earning staff behind the app?
Really appreciated how you framed this in your essay. It captures something that’s easy to miss if you’ve always had “better” options available: people aren’t comparing Uber to an ideal job, they’re comparing it to the jobs they can realistically get. That difference in perspective explains so much of the disconnect. Thanks for the read.
Thank you for writing this piece. The disconnect between the popular discourse and the actual lives of the working class is astounding. I appreciate you writing bridges to fill that gap.
Thanks Deric! I really appreciate your note. When I clicked publish, I honestly couldn’t tell if it would be of interest because I felt like I was saying something obvious to those around me. But it didn’t feel obvious in my new circles. I’m glad it is helpful. :)
I’m in the UK so I don't know much about the working conditions of US gig economy workers but…
I have been working for temporary employment agencies for several years, and it's really not that bad. If you're hard working and reliable then you stand a good chance of getting regular work and, if ever the shifts dry up, you can always go and work for another agency.
Most agencies pay at least minimum wage but I know of a few that skirt the rules. However temp work pays much better than being on benefits, even if the agency uses an umbrella payroll company that illegally deducts employers' national insurance, holiday pay and the cost of PPE that they never actually provide from your wages.
I've applied for benefits before and it was a horrible experience. I was struggling with social anxiety and I would have panic attacks and/or go mute every time I had to walk into the job centre. I applied for unemployment benefits only to be told that I needed to apply for disability benefits instead because I had autism. So I applied for disability benefits only to be told that I needed to apply for unemployment benefits because I was too high functioning to qualify for disability benefits. I kept getting boomeranged back and forth in this manner, never actually recieving any benefit money, until I eventually landed a job six weeks later.
I have had a few bad experiences with the agencies e.g. being sent to factories where the noise levels were unbearable only to be told that I can't wear ear defenders over the top of earplugs for ‘health and safety reasons’. When one job didn't work out, I would just sign up with another agency and hopefully get a better job somewhere else. I am now temping in a nice quiet warehouse and I have a blissful job where I rarely have to talk to anyone. I have tactile hypersensitivity and I would really struggle if I had a permanent job where I would almost certainly have to wear uniform or comply with a professional dress code. Luckily I don't have to wear uniform because I'm a temp, the dress code for temps is pretty casual and I provide my own PPE so I can look for more comfortable brands.
Every time the minimum wage goes up or some new law comes in to 'protect workers from exploitative conditions', I worry about the effect that the changes will have on my livelihood. Another minimum wage rise probably won't put me out of work, but it will make the more desirable jobs harder to get and force me into more stressful jobs.
Minimum wage rises don't make a big dent in official unemployment figures because a lot of people take more stressful jobs instead of becoming unemployed, and because small changes in the eligibility criteria for disability benefits have such a large effect on unemployment benefit claimant numbers that any smaller changes in unemployment benefit claimant numbers caused by minimum wage rises are hard to notice amongst the noise.
I suspect that one of the biggest reasons why I have been struggling to land a permanent job is because of the 2010 equality act, which protects disabled candidates from unfair dismissal. It is difficult for an employer to fire an unproductive autistic employee without getting on the wrong side of disability discriminations laws and ending up with a costly lawsuit. So employers would rather not take the risk of hiring an autistic candidate if they can't really tell whether or not they would turn out to be a productive worker from the limited information they can glean from a CV and a couple of interviews in which the candidate was very nervous, stumbled over words and barely managed to say anything.
The biggest downside of temporary work is that it is almost impossible to rent a flat or get a mortgage as a temp. On the other hand lots of live-in landlords will rent rooms to temps, whereas if you're on benefits then even renting a room is pretty much impossible. These problems have gotten much worse recently here in the UK due to the Rent Reform Bill. It's becoming much harder for landlords to evict tenants, and as a result landlords are very choosy about who they rent to.
My boyfriend earns good money as an engineer and we have substantial savings between us and a good credit rating but we're still stuck in shared housing as our combined income does not meet the ridiculous affordability criteria that landlords have these days and our savings aren't quite enough for a deposit on a property.
Angela, thanks so much for sharing your story. This sounds like a rough place to be and that you’re getting through it so well! I had never thought about the impact of minimum wage increases like that, and how it might make some workers nervous. Ideally we would live in a world where it isn’t hard to find roles that work for you or find stable affordable housing. Thank you so much for sharing this. If it’s okay I might ask you questions later about your experience when I do a deep dive on some of the policies you mentioned! :)
For the record, both Uber and DoorDash offer health insurance (or, more accurately, have relationships with companies that offer insurance at fairly reasonable rates, which they advertise to the drivers).
Great piece. I feel like we often talk about financial health through a middle-class lens, but as you’ve pointed out, for millions of people, exploitation is relative. And the people who are writing about solutions are rarely solving the problems on the ground.
Honestly, reminds me a lot of the research I was doing on the invisible load and how feminism is more than just a gender issue but also a class issue. We see people certain of their security, and therefore of themselves, lecturing the room on 'empowerment' while they rely on the very labor they critique.
I love how Kiran Desai captures this: "The people who are strong are the ones who appear weak, and the ones who appear strong, well, the confidence usually rests on luck and money... I watch women who are certain of their security... lecturing the room on the subject of feminism... and I know they wouldn’t be able to manage two days of life." This is exactly the kind of reality we need more of in these tech debates.
Thanks so much Sneha! I hadn’t thought about how it translates to feminism - I definitely see the parallels now that you point this out. I mentor young low income students on the side, on financial aid guarantees, and the advice that’s right for them is so so different than the typical advice. The average college student’s family income is higher than the national average, so advice is geared toward higher incomes usually.
This!! Reading Arne Duncan’s how school works really was such a magnificent look into challenging basic assumptions we make on education and getting more kids to school — there truly is never a one size fits all situation and just questioning the boundaries can do wonders
Like, in my experience of working class Midwest, healthcare for retail, construction, and daycare is actually pretty common and usual, at least if you are working not for independent contractors. Like that's part of why childcare is getting so expensive. Sure, there are independent in-home daycares where they take Obamacare. Actually most of the guys I know working in construction have *very* good healthcare-- but also the trades are highly unionized. Retail too-- when we had my daughter, H&M's coverage was actually better than what I had as an engineering contractor.
But yeah, I could see how in the anti-union south this would be very different. Like-- there's less day-labor construction work here, because the union guys make sure the state polices the shit out of independent contractors through code inspections. Like union guys will stop their van and call the city if they see a large unpermitted project. And generally in blue states there are more laws about what healthcare large employers have to provide, so most of the major center-based childcare places have healthcare because they exceed that minimum number of employees to hit those requirements. Same with the retailers (H&M is kind of a standout because they're European owned and the executives are basically horrified by US healthcare).
So yeah, this sounds much more like places where the unionized states do way better by the working class. I dunno, I grew up on welfare till I was about 6 and my single mom never made more than 30k-- and it sounds really, really sad that where you grew up serving tables was the job everyone recommended for tips? Like where I'm from, the advice is to get into a higher end retail job if you're a woman or into a trade if you're a dude.
Great point Jason! I am mostly thinking of Texas where I’m from and Virginia where I’ve lived and worked. I have never heard of retail, construction, or daycare giving healthcare unless you’re the managerial roles.
Most retail paid only minimum wage or slightly above that. I did try retail for a bit but I was frustrated they had a policy of not giving people that many hours. I think at some number of hours they have to offer benefits of some sort, so I always only had retail as a supplement to waiting tables.
Yeah, even when I was a kid retail (and retail fast food) paid above minimum wage just to attract enough workers.
There is kind of a step between new hire and full time, where like new hires were part time with no benefits but good performance could and easily did lead to full time work. Full time and access to benefits was how retail retained employees; a lot of people I knew would work full time job for benefits, and then also work part time at another job with higher pay but no benefits. I suppose now gig work would also be in the mix; I do have a cousin who does some gig work in between her other two jobs, but she gets her healthcare through her husband who is a security guy and former military. Other cousins earned their way up in Best Buy and one eventually to the ‘geek squad.’
But yeah, construction being on your list is also like super wild. I’ve got a few cousins in the trades; one cousin who does landscaping and tree removal is in pretty much constant demand and makes good money with benefits.
Interesting - yes, waiting tables was like this. I didn’t want to be managerial track because I suspected it made less than serving per hour, if I only got the best weekend morning shifts. I also knew I couldn’t do enough hours to be on track for health insurance because this was always during full time school.
I don’t remember retail paying above minimum wage but fast food definitely did.
For the construction, this is probably super regional or by specialty? I don’t know folks in landscaping or tree removal. The people I’m thinking of do day labor (as in, labor gigs by the day) or work on the building aspect of construction.
There is way less day labor here. I mean there are still like a few Home Depot’s where you can see day laborers hanging out, so it is not non-zero. But at least where I am from it is largely associated with illegal immigration; it’s not something you do if you have citizenship, even if you’re poor?
And like I said, union tradesmen are aggressive in making sure that all sites are permitted and inspected, so there is less opportunity for independent non-union contractors to get work without having their employment paperwork in order.
That is not to say there are no undocumented workers in construction here, but rather that the way it works usually means they have to find a contractor who will hire them regularly, often with forged paperwork.
But generally speaking, because the union guys are so aggressive about policing independent contractors and calling the city, there’s less opportunity for day labor. Not to mention that culturally there’s more pressure to hire unionized labor for construction in general, so more projects are union jobs.
My cousin in landscaping isn’t union, but I also have a cousin who is a union plumber. But neither of them work for outfits that hire day labor at all. If there’s a big project that they need extra hands for they tend to network through friends and family, like the landscaping cousin occasionally has a project where he’ll hit up other family members to show up and haul stuff or dig or whatever for a weekend and decent pay.
Personally, I hate exterior painting because my uncles basically dragged me to every paint job they did on the side for friends and family, so when my grandma’s house got repainted it was me and my other teen cousins who did the paint scraping, for example.
Oh interesting, Things are so different in union states.
As for the day labor, it is more associated with undocumented workers. I'm from a border community after all. But I also know some citizens who do it by going to formal agencies that set you up by the day. You get in line at 6am if you want to work that day, and they send you off to a different site. You have no idea what you'll work on that day. Undocumented folks tend to go to the specific parking lots or sidewalks.
The last couple of years, a lot of these folks have now gone to working in the oil fields for a couple days a time.
Exterior painting seems like a cool skill to have, at least!
These debates play out very differently in Australia, where employed workers have much better rights. Recent legal changes have extended most of these rights to "employee-like workers" aka gig workers
As a general observation, nearly all discussions of US wages, incomes, poverty etc would benefit from international comparisons. Arguably, Australian is one of the best comparators because it is similar to the US in many ways (UK-derived settler society, frontier history etc).
I'm reminded of the Youtube channel Invisible People. Most of the top-viewed videos on their channel are interviews with homeless people. They have over a million subscribers.
Maybe there's room for a similar channel interviewing working class people so we can get their opinions directly. Could even be a good business opportunity due to Youtube ad revenue.
Thanks for flagging! I didn’t realize there was so much demand for this type of message. :) I do love Humans of New York, which seems similar too. Thanks for the inspiration!
Another one: that viral song, Rich Men North of Richmond. It’s a basically a working class anthem, which to the college-educated mind sounds like it should mean communism. But the lyrics are actually more of a complaint about white collar government workers, taxes, inflation, and ineffective government programs. If you look through the youtube comments it resonated a ton with a lot of working people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
People love to meddle in the affairs of those whom they feel superior to. The way wealthy elites describe the labor market is the best example. They can't conceive of someone voluntarily taking a fast food job or a gig economy job that doesn't provide pay and benefits far beyond what is being produced. It's embarrassing to be honest. And what? I'm supposed to offer healthcare to the teenager who mows my lawn for 30 bucks in cash on Saturdays?
A contributor to this coverage is also how unions want to cover it. There was a world, maybe still exists, to improve uber drivers working conditions by forcing the apps to actually treat them fully as independent contractors- tell the driver where the end of the ride is before they accept it and all other info the drivers want so they can make an informed decision before they take the ride. Also by advocating they get more of the fare.
But unions don’t actually want drivers to be independent contractors they want to them to be employees because that’s the kind of worker unions know how to represent.
Whoa, that’s a complexity I never thought of at all. This is really helpful context!
Why don’t the ride sharing companies just implement the changes you described? Don’t see how it’s the fault of unions
Ridesharing companies want the best of both worlds. They want the control over workers that having employees give them, but they want the lack of responsibility that having independent contractors gives them. So a few years ago, when this was new and the workers were in the worst of both worlds, there was an advocacy choice – if they became more Like either thing, then their conditions would improve. There was no organized effort to get them to be real independent contractors. The organized effort was to make them be more like employees. Which makes perfect sense unions exist to organize employees.
That organized effort means that the public discourse focuses on the things that the workers don’t have that employees do have – predictable schedules, healthcare, minimum wage. If there was an effort to make them more like independent contractors, then the discourse would have focused on the things that independent contractors have that they don’t have – Full knowledge of the job they’re being offered before they take it, a higher cut of the fare.
My thanks to Abi for the excellent article. I think the issues Sonja raises are central, and deserve elaborating. First, the promise of TNCs circa 2014 was so exciting: an enormous expansion in the ability of any adult to sell their own labor in a way that puts them in control. Have a complicated personal life that doesn’t fit with most shift schedules? Health issues that make your availability highly unpredictable? TNC driving routes right around those brutal blockers to getting a normal job. So far so fantastic.
Unfortunately, there are two big structural problems that make the work worse than waiting tables or ad hoc vending. First, you are driving your car. That means you are sitting, breathing exhaust, and risking crashes as you earn. You are also sharply depreciating the value of your capital investment. I do not believe most TNC drivers accurately account for those harms, risks, and costs. Second, as Sonja documents, the TNC companies are extraordinarily aggressive about extracting all of the value in the system and pushing all of the costs onto labor. They employ hundreds of data scientists who squeeze as much money from the system as they can, framing driver earnings as lost revenue to be captured.
Thanks Sam and Sonja! I agree with both of you. Based on my research, Uber/Lyft are getting to take a larger cut of fares! Compared to earlier in their history and compared to competitors. A competitor app Empower (where drivers get 100% of fare but *drivers* pay a monthly fee) is even trying to get a bill passed that would allow individuals to register as self-employed business of private hire drivers in DC so they can get their own liability insurance, and do the things that truly private contractors do. There’s definitely ways to operate TNCs that give drivers more clarity and control.
https://abio.substack.com/p/the-boring-reason-we-dont-have-7
Unless you're driving a collectable classic, your car is not a capital investment (which one anticipates will gain in value) but an investment of capital (virtually all cars depreciate in value over time--even if you don't drive them).
Thank you for the correction!
Thank you for discussing this phenomenon. I saw a Threads post of people shaming someone for working at DoorDash as their main source of income and was instantly angry. The Pragmatic Engineer also recently released an update about how the Reddit post on an alleged UberEats whistleblower was completely Ai generated and people still thought it was justified because “it’s ok to fake evidence if it’s believable”. These double standards are frustrating and I wish more people realized how damaging it is for the same communities they claim to fight for.
Wow. Thats awful. Definitely not ok to fake evidence. Thanks for highlighting these!!
So I couldn’t I stop thinking about your comment, and people shaming someone for getting their main income from DoorDash. Why was it considered shameful?
https://www.threads.com/@dana.kinzer/post/DTBzZ-WAH6M?xmt=AQF0wAV7Ua70luaY57N4g3Xirt-FZ3f4pxeCwXekH3SWMUynMOnlFFl2KLtEE0PzUvIBhTfv&slof=1
Here is a link to the full thread, it seems as if people were saying that there were “better systems”, without really giving a real solution or alternative.
https://www.threads.com/@gergelyorosz_/post/DTKW5hXDHmm?xmt=AQF0XXQ5DnSMCAJt0oGvuizkBS8hPJGZ9wBfxOjlXskSEkM6y1diAwYXzcbPZ2sTfCBLPNsW&slof=1
Here’s a link to how the original claim was debunked as well!
Thanks so much for flagging! :)
ugh unfortunately I'm not even shocked by the financial shaming, but the AI whistleblower and "better systems" comment point displays the ultimate rich-blindness. it's the classic money whisper, the quiet, systemic lie we tell ourselves to feel like the good guys even when we’re ignoring the community’s actual reality. Spot on, and honestly, a bit devastating.
Great post! I'm surprised that there are only 1m minimum wage earners -- that's way smaller than I would have guessed. I assume a lot of people are earning local minimum wage. I dunno how different that is in practice -- maybe in some places that's a pretty similar lifestyle due to the salary being similar, and/or due to cost disease eating up the difference?
Wikipedia says "In January 2020, almost 90% of Americans earning the minimum wage were earning more than the federal minimum wage due to local minimum wages". If that still holds, that means approx 10m people are on _some_ minimum wage, but only 1m of those are on federal minimum.
The figure I have seen is about 40% of the workforce earns $20/hr or less. The prevailing entry-level wage around here (West Michigan) is about $14-15 or so (state minimum is $13.73).
I’ll likely change the post to account for this. Thank you!!
My experience with DoorDash has been that I typically make about $20/hr and slightly more with Uber. But my occasional forays into the metroplex 50 miles away is that I can make close to $30 there with Uber.
This is such an excellent point. I didn’t even think to check out local minimum wages. I also wonder whether it’s pretty similar lifestyle or whether they vary *that* much. Including local minimum wages makes the number a lot bigger. This is really helpful for my future research Ashwin, thanks for this.
Great piece, Abi!
I totally agree people who have not experienced actually doing normal entry-level or non-traditional work tend to not understand it.
I once worked as a vendor at a baseball stadium. You had to front the cash to buy the inventory, and there was no wage at all — earnings depended one hundred percent on how many items you sold. But I loved that job, because I could hustle and make about a hundred bucks in a two hour shift. I was many years past college before I did anything that could net fifty bucks an hour again. That wasn’t exploitation, that was awesome flexibility.
Whoa, that’s a really cool example. I didn’t think of jobs that make you front expenses! Selling Avon works like that sometimes.
I’m starting to wonder whether we single out tech platforms for just being particularly visible and/or for having small, high earning staff behind the app?
Why is the demonization different?
Thanks so much Andrew!!
Might be something like an anti-novelty bias? Or like, seeing new things as needing to justify themselves in ways that old things don't?
OOooOo yes, great points!! I hadn’t thought of that!
Really appreciated how you framed this in your essay. It captures something that’s easy to miss if you’ve always had “better” options available: people aren’t comparing Uber to an ideal job, they’re comparing it to the jobs they can realistically get. That difference in perspective explains so much of the disconnect. Thanks for the read.
Thanks so much Quy! I appreciate your note. :)
How is every piece you write such a banger??
Andy, thanks so so much!
Thank you for writing this piece. The disconnect between the popular discourse and the actual lives of the working class is astounding. I appreciate you writing bridges to fill that gap.
Thanks Deric! I really appreciate your note. When I clicked publish, I honestly couldn’t tell if it would be of interest because I felt like I was saying something obvious to those around me. But it didn’t feel obvious in my new circles. I’m glad it is helpful. :)
I’m in the UK so I don't know much about the working conditions of US gig economy workers but…
I have been working for temporary employment agencies for several years, and it's really not that bad. If you're hard working and reliable then you stand a good chance of getting regular work and, if ever the shifts dry up, you can always go and work for another agency.
Most agencies pay at least minimum wage but I know of a few that skirt the rules. However temp work pays much better than being on benefits, even if the agency uses an umbrella payroll company that illegally deducts employers' national insurance, holiday pay and the cost of PPE that they never actually provide from your wages.
I've applied for benefits before and it was a horrible experience. I was struggling with social anxiety and I would have panic attacks and/or go mute every time I had to walk into the job centre. I applied for unemployment benefits only to be told that I needed to apply for disability benefits instead because I had autism. So I applied for disability benefits only to be told that I needed to apply for unemployment benefits because I was too high functioning to qualify for disability benefits. I kept getting boomeranged back and forth in this manner, never actually recieving any benefit money, until I eventually landed a job six weeks later.
I have had a few bad experiences with the agencies e.g. being sent to factories where the noise levels were unbearable only to be told that I can't wear ear defenders over the top of earplugs for ‘health and safety reasons’. When one job didn't work out, I would just sign up with another agency and hopefully get a better job somewhere else. I am now temping in a nice quiet warehouse and I have a blissful job where I rarely have to talk to anyone. I have tactile hypersensitivity and I would really struggle if I had a permanent job where I would almost certainly have to wear uniform or comply with a professional dress code. Luckily I don't have to wear uniform because I'm a temp, the dress code for temps is pretty casual and I provide my own PPE so I can look for more comfortable brands.
Every time the minimum wage goes up or some new law comes in to 'protect workers from exploitative conditions', I worry about the effect that the changes will have on my livelihood. Another minimum wage rise probably won't put me out of work, but it will make the more desirable jobs harder to get and force me into more stressful jobs.
Minimum wage rises don't make a big dent in official unemployment figures because a lot of people take more stressful jobs instead of becoming unemployed, and because small changes in the eligibility criteria for disability benefits have such a large effect on unemployment benefit claimant numbers that any smaller changes in unemployment benefit claimant numbers caused by minimum wage rises are hard to notice amongst the noise.
I suspect that one of the biggest reasons why I have been struggling to land a permanent job is because of the 2010 equality act, which protects disabled candidates from unfair dismissal. It is difficult for an employer to fire an unproductive autistic employee without getting on the wrong side of disability discriminations laws and ending up with a costly lawsuit. So employers would rather not take the risk of hiring an autistic candidate if they can't really tell whether or not they would turn out to be a productive worker from the limited information they can glean from a CV and a couple of interviews in which the candidate was very nervous, stumbled over words and barely managed to say anything.
The biggest downside of temporary work is that it is almost impossible to rent a flat or get a mortgage as a temp. On the other hand lots of live-in landlords will rent rooms to temps, whereas if you're on benefits then even renting a room is pretty much impossible. These problems have gotten much worse recently here in the UK due to the Rent Reform Bill. It's becoming much harder for landlords to evict tenants, and as a result landlords are very choosy about who they rent to.
My boyfriend earns good money as an engineer and we have substantial savings between us and a good credit rating but we're still stuck in shared housing as our combined income does not meet the ridiculous affordability criteria that landlords have these days and our savings aren't quite enough for a deposit on a property.
Angela, thanks so much for sharing your story. This sounds like a rough place to be and that you’re getting through it so well! I had never thought about the impact of minimum wage increases like that, and how it might make some workers nervous. Ideally we would live in a world where it isn’t hard to find roles that work for you or find stable affordable housing. Thank you so much for sharing this. If it’s okay I might ask you questions later about your experience when I do a deep dive on some of the policies you mentioned! :)
For the record, both Uber and DoorDash offer health insurance (or, more accurately, have relationships with companies that offer insurance at fairly reasonable rates, which they advertise to the drivers).
Oh thank you! Is it related to Obamacare or marketplace? Is there an employer subsidy or is it more like group insurance discount rate???
Great piece. I feel like we often talk about financial health through a middle-class lens, but as you’ve pointed out, for millions of people, exploitation is relative. And the people who are writing about solutions are rarely solving the problems on the ground.
Honestly, reminds me a lot of the research I was doing on the invisible load and how feminism is more than just a gender issue but also a class issue. We see people certain of their security, and therefore of themselves, lecturing the room on 'empowerment' while they rely on the very labor they critique.
I love how Kiran Desai captures this: "The people who are strong are the ones who appear weak, and the ones who appear strong, well, the confidence usually rests on luck and money... I watch women who are certain of their security... lecturing the room on the subject of feminism... and I know they wouldn’t be able to manage two days of life." This is exactly the kind of reality we need more of in these tech debates.
Thanks so much Sneha! I hadn’t thought about how it translates to feminism - I definitely see the parallels now that you point this out. I mentor young low income students on the side, on financial aid guarantees, and the advice that’s right for them is so so different than the typical advice. The average college student’s family income is higher than the national average, so advice is geared toward higher incomes usually.
This!! Reading Arne Duncan’s how school works really was such a magnificent look into challenging basic assumptions we make on education and getting more kids to school — there truly is never a one size fits all situation and just questioning the boundaries can do wonders
Abi, your succinct style is really great. Keep at it.
Thanks so much Jon! The succinct style I did here was also really fun to write. I’m glad you enjoyed it. :)
I think this is very much regional?
Like, in my experience of working class Midwest, healthcare for retail, construction, and daycare is actually pretty common and usual, at least if you are working not for independent contractors. Like that's part of why childcare is getting so expensive. Sure, there are independent in-home daycares where they take Obamacare. Actually most of the guys I know working in construction have *very* good healthcare-- but also the trades are highly unionized. Retail too-- when we had my daughter, H&M's coverage was actually better than what I had as an engineering contractor.
But yeah, I could see how in the anti-union south this would be very different. Like-- there's less day-labor construction work here, because the union guys make sure the state polices the shit out of independent contractors through code inspections. Like union guys will stop their van and call the city if they see a large unpermitted project. And generally in blue states there are more laws about what healthcare large employers have to provide, so most of the major center-based childcare places have healthcare because they exceed that minimum number of employees to hit those requirements. Same with the retailers (H&M is kind of a standout because they're European owned and the executives are basically horrified by US healthcare).
So yeah, this sounds much more like places where the unionized states do way better by the working class. I dunno, I grew up on welfare till I was about 6 and my single mom never made more than 30k-- and it sounds really, really sad that where you grew up serving tables was the job everyone recommended for tips? Like where I'm from, the advice is to get into a higher end retail job if you're a woman or into a trade if you're a dude.
Great point Jason! I am mostly thinking of Texas where I’m from and Virginia where I’ve lived and worked. I have never heard of retail, construction, or daycare giving healthcare unless you’re the managerial roles.
Most retail paid only minimum wage or slightly above that. I did try retail for a bit but I was frustrated they had a policy of not giving people that many hours. I think at some number of hours they have to offer benefits of some sort, so I always only had retail as a supplement to waiting tables.
It sounds regional, I agree.
Yeah, even when I was a kid retail (and retail fast food) paid above minimum wage just to attract enough workers.
There is kind of a step between new hire and full time, where like new hires were part time with no benefits but good performance could and easily did lead to full time work. Full time and access to benefits was how retail retained employees; a lot of people I knew would work full time job for benefits, and then also work part time at another job with higher pay but no benefits. I suppose now gig work would also be in the mix; I do have a cousin who does some gig work in between her other two jobs, but she gets her healthcare through her husband who is a security guy and former military. Other cousins earned their way up in Best Buy and one eventually to the ‘geek squad.’
But yeah, construction being on your list is also like super wild. I’ve got a few cousins in the trades; one cousin who does landscaping and tree removal is in pretty much constant demand and makes good money with benefits.
Interesting - yes, waiting tables was like this. I didn’t want to be managerial track because I suspected it made less than serving per hour, if I only got the best weekend morning shifts. I also knew I couldn’t do enough hours to be on track for health insurance because this was always during full time school.
I don’t remember retail paying above minimum wage but fast food definitely did.
For the construction, this is probably super regional or by specialty? I don’t know folks in landscaping or tree removal. The people I’m thinking of do day labor (as in, labor gigs by the day) or work on the building aspect of construction.
There is way less day labor here. I mean there are still like a few Home Depot’s where you can see day laborers hanging out, so it is not non-zero. But at least where I am from it is largely associated with illegal immigration; it’s not something you do if you have citizenship, even if you’re poor?
And like I said, union tradesmen are aggressive in making sure that all sites are permitted and inspected, so there is less opportunity for independent non-union contractors to get work without having their employment paperwork in order.
That is not to say there are no undocumented workers in construction here, but rather that the way it works usually means they have to find a contractor who will hire them regularly, often with forged paperwork.
But generally speaking, because the union guys are so aggressive about policing independent contractors and calling the city, there’s less opportunity for day labor. Not to mention that culturally there’s more pressure to hire unionized labor for construction in general, so more projects are union jobs.
My cousin in landscaping isn’t union, but I also have a cousin who is a union plumber. But neither of them work for outfits that hire day labor at all. If there’s a big project that they need extra hands for they tend to network through friends and family, like the landscaping cousin occasionally has a project where he’ll hit up other family members to show up and haul stuff or dig or whatever for a weekend and decent pay.
Personally, I hate exterior painting because my uncles basically dragged me to every paint job they did on the side for friends and family, so when my grandma’s house got repainted it was me and my other teen cousins who did the paint scraping, for example.
Oh interesting, Things are so different in union states.
As for the day labor, it is more associated with undocumented workers. I'm from a border community after all. But I also know some citizens who do it by going to formal agencies that set you up by the day. You get in line at 6am if you want to work that day, and they send you off to a different site. You have no idea what you'll work on that day. Undocumented folks tend to go to the specific parking lots or sidewalks.
The last couple of years, a lot of these folks have now gone to working in the oil fields for a couple days a time.
Exterior painting seems like a cool skill to have, at least!
These debates play out very differently in Australia, where employed workers have much better rights. Recent legal changes have extended most of these rights to "employee-like workers" aka gig workers
https://www.australianunions.org.au/2024/11/04/new-rights-and-protections-for-gig-economy-workers/
As a general observation, nearly all discussions of US wages, incomes, poverty etc would benefit from international comparisons. Arguably, Australian is one of the best comparators because it is similar to the US in many ways (UK-derived settler society, frontier history etc).
Thanks John! Great point about comparing to Australia.
I'm reminded of the Youtube channel Invisible People. Most of the top-viewed videos on their channel are interviews with homeless people. They have over a million subscribers.
https://www.youtube.com/@InvisiblePeople/videos
Maybe there's room for a similar channel interviewing working class people so we can get their opinions directly. Could even be a good business opportunity due to Youtube ad revenue.
I guess the Walking the World substack is sort of like that: https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/
Thanks for flagging! I didn’t realize there was so much demand for this type of message. :) I do love Humans of New York, which seems similar too. Thanks for the inspiration!
Another one: that viral song, Rich Men North of Richmond. It’s a basically a working class anthem, which to the college-educated mind sounds like it should mean communism. But the lyrics are actually more of a complaint about white collar government workers, taxes, inflation, and ineffective government programs. If you look through the youtube comments it resonated a ton with a lot of working people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
People love to meddle in the affairs of those whom they feel superior to. The way wealthy elites describe the labor market is the best example. They can't conceive of someone voluntarily taking a fast food job or a gig economy job that doesn't provide pay and benefits far beyond what is being produced. It's embarrassing to be honest. And what? I'm supposed to offer healthcare to the teenager who mows my lawn for 30 bucks in cash on Saturdays?
I don’t think it’s a superiority thing. I do think people mean well. My guess is that the groups are quite disconnected.
It’s, “to whom they feel superior.”
/s