DRIVING AS GLAMOROUS LABOR

How Uber Uses the Myths of the Sharing Economy

In the spring of 2010, Uber launched the first beta version of its now-famous smartphone app. It promised to revolutionize transportation. Uber offered anyone with a car a new way to earn extra income through casual jobs as a driver. Meanwhile, anyone needing a ride could now benefit from an affordable, on-demand chauffeur service to get around. The Uber platform allows users to seamlessly connect passengers and drivers: it calculates the rates, transmits credit card information, and maintains quality ratings for drivers and riders alike.

As a company, Uber has unquestionably changed the way people get around hundreds of cities across the world. It has become a symbol of the New Economy and, for some, the future of work. Uber advertises that its drivers are entrepreneurs who can, with flexible schedules, make middle-class incomes even in an unstable economy. But do these assertions hold up to scrutiny, or is the company playing us with false claims?

THE GREAT RECESSION AND THE SHARING ECONOMY

Before we can understand how Uber treats its drivers, it's necessary to take a step back. Uber's employment model was born in the so-called sharing economy, a social technology movement that capitalized on the economic instability of the Great Recession to sell a narrative. Between 2007 and 2009, the Great Recession and collapse of the subprime mortgage markets ravaged American households with waves of foreclosures. The collapse of financial markets challenged societal confidence in American institutions, like banking and governance, while an exodus of former homeowners shut down neighborhoods and led to urban blight in cities like Detroit and Cleveland. Job losses increased suddenly, and national unemployment climbed to 10 percent in October 2009. This instability sharpened the economic consequences of prolonged joblessness for white-collar workers, who comprised 60 percent of the labor force; by 2009, they accounted for nearly half of the long-term unemployed. Still, the greatest job losses from the Great Recession were concentrated in blue-collar industries among workers under thirty. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, its impact on unemployment persisted well into the economic recovery.

This context helps explain why sharing-economy companies with roots in Silicon Valley, like Uber, so often frame their technologies as powerful engines of job creation. In the media and in some academic debates, the future of work is framed as the threat of a robot coming for your job. While society may benefit from automated work, the fear is that these benefits will not be distributed equally: jobless futures imply some will get left behind. This threat is not an inherent characteristic of technology but, rather, comes from the current American economic climate. As Philip Alston, a poverty investigator from the United Nations, observed at the end of 2017, "The reality is that the United States now has probably the lowest degree of social mobility among all the rich countries. And if you are born poor, guess where you're going to end up — poor." When technology innovators use "job creation" language, they engage in virtue-signaling: the implication is that not only do they deserve credit for producing large economic gains for society, but also they should be shielded from harsh criticism for their methods because the end result is positive.

The sharing economy promised to save the day for a population shaken by the Great Recession: using technology, millions of people across society would now be able to efficiently pool and share their limited resources. The seeds of Uber took root in a climate of profound economic uncertainty. After the recession hit in 2007, shockwaves of economic downturn rippled across the globe: Greece's government tumbled into insolvency, while in Iceland, bankers were frog-marched to jail for burdening the country with a private banking debt seven times its annual GDP. In the aftermath, the front pages of newspapers regularly featured Middle Eastern and African refugees drowning as they tried to reach Europe, compounding a sense of economic urgency in the United States with global humanitarian concerns arising from geopolitical conflict. The collapse of Wall Street was a reminder that no empire, not even the American kingdom of financiers, is absolute. At the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, leading economists began to rewrite their theories with a new focus on income equality, replacing earlier ideas that had emphasized growth above all else.

Back in the United States, victims of the Great Recession began to push back against the corporations and practices that had caused the crisis. The City of Baltimore, the State of Illinois, and the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission, among other, bigger victims of foreclosures, sued the notorious lending institutions whose high-risk lending fueled the Great Recession — institutions like Wells Fargo — and settled for hundreds of millions. Predatory lending practices targeted racial minorities during the subprime boom, highlighting the role of finance in social injustice. Emergent social movements that advocate for social equity, like Occupy Wall Street, organized activists with a common desire to re-center society around a moral economy.

While Occupy Wall Street activists formed a tent city in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, members of Black Lives Matter were staging protests across the country to advocate a political agenda that could address the root causes of inequality. Soon, more voices joined the chorus, this time from the top. Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income, and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard. This quasi-moral solution to income inequality — and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation — finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley. Home to the billion-dollar titans of industry, who form a slightly reluctant political elite in the New Economy, Silicon Valley and the culture of technology radiate influence across the business, political, and media culture of major American cities. And Silicon Valley has a strong stake in national debates over whether automation technology, such as self-driving cars, will take all our jobs. Universal basic income is...