Last October, the East Bay Economic Development Alliance, a nonprofit in Oakland, California, hosted a virtual event called “Beyond the Gig Economy.” The Presidential election was a week away, and a new law on the ballot, Proposition 22, promised to affect the fate of many of California’s gig workers. In 2019, the state’s legislature had reclassified some part-time and gig workers—including drivers for services such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash—as employees, rather than contractors. This would entitle them to paid sick leave, a guaranteed minimum wage, and other benefits. But Prop. 22, which had been crafted by the gig-work platforms, made app-based companies exempt from the new rule. Work part time as a nurse in a doctor’s office, and you’d get benefits; drive part time for Uber, and you wouldn’t.
Throughout the fall, Prop. 22 had been a subject of intense debate. The gig-work companies argued that, if it didn’t pass, prices would go up; they threatened to take away workers’ flexible schedules. Gig workers, labor unions, and Democratic politicians, meanwhile, contended that the platforms were impoverishing their workers, dismissed as a false choice the trade-off between flexibility and benefits, and cautioned against setting a legal precedent for other states. It was the costliest ballot measure fight in California history, with the gig platforms pouring more than two hundred million dollars into the campaign for Prop. 22—outspending their opponents ten to one. The mood in California’s progressive circles was grim.
The invited speaker at that morning’s event, a British policy entrepreneur named Wingham Rowan, maintained that the real battle lay elsewhere. Sixty years old, with dark hair, a lean face, and glasses, Rowan has a youthful affect and a quick wit honed through a career as a TV host. He called Proposition 22 a “tempest in a teapot”—“a sideshow”—and told the audience not to think of it as “some sort of endgame in the fight for precarious workers’ rights.” During a data-dense presentation, he outlined eight major challenges faced by gig workers: misclassification, lack of benefits, no progression, high worker overhead, misleading promises from employers, sudden market closures, pay cuts, and having an algorithm as a boss. He said that defeating Prop. 22 would solve only the first issue, part of the second, and maybe the fourth, then offered an ambitious plan that he thought could address all eight.
Rowan’s idea is to create markets for gig work that are run as public utilities, by non-profits and governments. Instead of getting work through a private company, such as Uber, a job seeker in Rowan’s system could use a Web site or app overseen by the government and regulated to promote the public interest. Many kinds of work could be offered through such public platforms, not just driving. The platforms could be run on open-source software, such as the system that has been built by his nonprofit, Modern Markets for All; private companies might bid to operate them, following the concession model currently used in national lotteries and parks. Such an approach wouldn’t use regulation to hobble the gig-work Goliaths. It would compete with them, combining many gig-work options into a broader labor market designed to benefit workers and the public.
“What does a really healthy hourly labor market look like in the twenty-first century?” Rowan asked the Zoom’s participants, from his book-lined office in London. As he enumerated such a market’s optimal features—the power to draw economic activity out of the informal economy; minimal transaction fees; responsiveness not just to labor laws but to workers’ ultimate goals, which might include education and training—it became clear what he was not imagining. “Everything I just described does not add up to a sizzling Silicon Valley investment opportunity,” he said. “It’s a public utility.”
Rowan offered an example of the sort of transaction that might be conducted on publicly run gig-work software. Suppose that you were Oakland’s city government, and you were in search of window-washers. “If you wanted to know how many people did window-cleaning bookings on a Tuesday morning, within three miles of Oakland City Hall, where the worker was under twenty-six and had previously been in the services, it will tell you,” he said, of the software. “If you want to compare their earnings to classroom assistants, working part time, on the eastern side of town, it will do that for you. You gain huge pools of actionable data that can be used to plot interventions, find the strugglers who need help.” Citizens could use the same software to book child care, yard work, tutoring, or bike repair, and to buy or rent appliances, vehicles, and living space. As on Uber, buyers and sellers would accumulate reliability records; unlike on Uber, features such as health-care contributions and retirement benefits could be built in. This gig-work market wouldn’t be run for profit but to facilitate local economic exchange. “You can have it for the East Bay tomorrow,” Rowan said, of the core software.
In talking about the labor markets he envisions—he calls them Public Official E-Markets, or POEMs—Rowan often draws analogies to the technologies of the past. In Victorian London, he says, a number of competing private companies provided a sporadic supply of drinking water; often, it was foul with contaminants. During the same period, thousands of American firms built and operated toll roads, which varied widely in quality. Public-infrastructure pioneers such as Edwin Chadwick and William Phelps Eno—both among Rowan’s heroes—turned those flawed private systems into public utilities. Doing this greatly diminished competition, but also opened up new possibilities. Governments were able to flood valleys to create massive reservoirs, and to purchase enough private land to create the ideal roadways. In Rowan’s view, our current labor markets resemble London’s water-supply system circa 1840: today’s gig-work markets are like a demo of a promising technology. If they were publicly owned and expanded, decent, flexible work could flow like running water.
For more than a decade, Rowan has been trying to get such markets going. On Zoom, he shared an image of a plummeting graph: it showed the number of available hours listed by workers after the launch of a small, public gig-work market in London. “The first week, with very little publicity, they had eighteen thousand hours of residents’ availability for work,” he said. But “they had seventy hours of demand from employers, because nobody had thought to outreach to the demand side.” The lesson, he thought, was clear: “People desperately need a better model for this kind of work—they will sign up in droves. But the employers will be much slower.” In Oakland and elsewhere, Rowan is now trying, with increasing success, to convince governments and employers to join in creating gig-work platforms for the people.
Rowan, who grew up in a small village in the west of England, is not so much a stereotypical “founder” as an irrepressibly inventive brewer of schemes. At sixteen, he decided that he wanted to be a journalist and immediately began pitching ideas to local newspapers and television stations. For one paper, he wrote on what bored kids could do over the school holidays; for a late-night TV program, he made a spot on fun ideas for teen-agers. “I got this notion that pushing ideas was a way to have an exciting life, compared to my peers who were plugging through their exams,” he told me. Rowan speaks in rapid, precise sentences bursting with data and details; if you didn’t know his background, you might easily confuse him for a policy adviser or an academic. In fact, he never attended university, and instead went straight to work as a runner and a program host for a television station.
In 1982, he began hosting “Rowan’s Report,” a children’s television show which profiled successful British children—singers, dancers, models, swimmers. The show lasted only two seasons, and at twenty-three Rowan switched from presenting to producing, hopping between shows on current events and pop culture. He began travelling and reading voraciously, visiting Romania, South Africa, and Gaza, and devouring books on economics, technology, and history. By 1995, he had created and begun hosting a late-night TV show about people with kinks—foot fetishists, voyeurs, adults aroused by wearing diapers—who connected with one another over the then-novel Internet. Rowan credits his experience on the show with the initial idea for creating digital markets that function as public utilities. “I just thought, there’s got to be more to it than people telling each other where the best hotel-room windows are for voyeurs,” he said.
In 1994, Rowan crafted a proposal about online goods and labor markets and shared it with Geoff Mulgan, the founding director of Demos, a cross-party think tank that strives to bridge entrenched political divides. Mulgan, who holds a Ph.D. in telecommunications, remembered how, at that time, many people assumed that the Internet would become an empowering, egalitarian alternative to economies dominated by huge corporations. “That assumption was completely wrong, as it turned out,” Mulgan told me. But, at the time, it seemed obvious that the Internet could soon enable new kinds of markets, allowing wealth to circulate within communities rather than flowing away to corporate shareholders. Craigslist was founded in 1995, and the power of bottom-up online marketplaces was a thrilling novelty, overshadowing the possibility of corporatization.
Demos began inviting economists, policy experts, and technologists to workshops and panels about Rowan’s ideas. Rowan’s first book, “Guaranteed Electronic Markets: The Backbone of a Twenty-first Century Economy?,” was published by Demos in 1997; a second book, expanding on the first, was published by Macmillan in 1999, and received favorable attention from the Guardian, the BBC, and figures in business and politics. During those years, Rowan thought that the widespread adoption of some version of the concept seemed inevitable.
Over the past twenty-five years, Rowan and his nonprofit have consulted with national, state, and local governments around the world. He has given a TED talk, helped launch various pilot programs, and advised many powerful philanthropists and influential politicians. In the late nineties, Mulgan was a social policy adviser to Tony Blair, and tried to communicate Rowan’s ideas within the British government. But the public-gig-work idea has encountered seemingly unending political, technical, and ideological obstacles. “By doing something for real, it stops being a beautiful abstraction,” Rowan told me. “It becomes messy—you have to make compromises, you make mistakes, you arouse opposition.” Mulgan told me that he thinks that post-pandemic governments might be more receptive. “That religious faith in private-sector superiority is gone, to some extent,” he said.
The city of Los Angeles is currently considering a motion that would begin the process of creating an online, public labor market; in November, Los Angeles County voters passed Measure J, a law that will bar hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from being spent on incarceration and law enforcement, directing it toward social services. “Measure J talks about things like mental-health support, entry-level ladders into the job market, creating work,” Rowan said. He believes that a gig-work market would be the best way to actually create employment. “Let’s assume that I’m a young guy living in East L.A.,” he said. “If there are funds available to give me work, and to get me some sort of support, then the question becomes, how is all that scheduled?” He imagined a hypothetical job seeker who’d previously worked in retail and hospitality; such a person could be hired, on an hourly basis, into a government-run mentor-mentee program, while finding other work on the same platform. Instead of trying to create new jobs wholesale, the system could provide work an hour at a time.
In recent years, private gig-work markets have become a defining feature of modern American life. In 2017, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that thirty-four per cent of American workers held gig positions. The bureau projected that the figure would reach forty-three per cent by 2020; it appears likely that the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the trend. It’s quite possible for gig work to supplement an existing job, providing a little cash on the side. But, for an increasing number of people, it’s now a substantial stream of income—for some, it’s the only stream.
Rowan divides gig workers into three categories. There are the “voluntary irregulars,” who choose to take on gigs such as driving for Lyft or similar companies. There are the “forced irregulars,” who want full-time jobs but can’t find them, and so turn to gig work out of necessity. Finally, there are the “core irregulars,” who can’t work full time because of medical or family circumstances and depend on gig work for its flexibility. “Maybe I have back pain that comes and goes, so I don’t know if I can work tomorrow—I’ll know when I wake up,” Rowan said. “Maybe I have two parents with Alzheimer’s. Can I work tomorrow? I’ll have to decide at lunchtime.”
For people in the latter two categories, especially, gig work is a badly fraying lifeline. In 2019, the Federal Reserve reported that fifty-eight per cent of full-time gig workers said that they would find it hard to come up with four hundred dollars in the event of an emergency. And yet for some people the flexibility and spontaneity of gig work is a boon. In reforming or rethinking the system, the challenge is keeping the good aspects while minimizing the bad.
There are ways in which the business models of today’s gig-work platforms limit their usefulness for workers. Most platforms focus on a single, narrow business, such as food delivery; backed by deep-pocketed investors, they keep prices unsustainably low so as to achieve market dominance quickly. Meanwhile, many keep as much as thirty per cent of each fare. Rowan argues that a publicly owned gig-work platform could keep a much smaller share of each transaction—perhaps as little as two per cent—leaving more money available to provide decent wages and benefits. And a public gig-work market could offer different kinds of work, some higher-paying. Perhaps someone who drives for Uber today was once employed as a classroom assistant, a chef, or a home health aide; a publicly owned gig-work market could offer that kind of work, too, allowing the worker to have a mix of gigs that could add up to the equivalent of a full-time job, with benefits.
The Link LonkMarch 23, 2021 at 05:00PM
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