If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Minimum wage" is one of those odd concepts that seems to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can't find a job, then the minimum wage you'll get is zero:
That's why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada's New Democratic Party) has call for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:
(Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)
If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered the America's system of national parks, among many other achievements:
The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a "minimum wage." Even when we're talking about people who have wages, the idea of a "minimum wage" is anything but straightforward.
Take gig workers: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers who are misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It's a weird kind of "independent contractor" who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their "client's" livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their "client":
The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages. I'm not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):
I'm talking about how gig-work platforms define their workers' wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California's Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:
When Toronto was grappling with the brutal effect that gig-work taxis have on the city's world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers "120% of the minimum wage," which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the real wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about $2.50 per hour:
How to explain the difference? Well, Uber – and its gig-work competitors – only pay drivers while they have a passenger – or an item – in the car. Drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a job or the time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.
Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don't get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?
That's true, but livery cab drivers have lots of ways to influence that number. They can shrewdly choose a good spot to cruise. They can give their cellphone numbers to riders they've established a rapport with in order to win advance bookings. In small towns with just a few drivers – or in cities where drivers are in a co-op – they can spend some of their earnings to advertise the taxi company. Livery drivers can offer discounts to riders going a long way. It's a tough job, but it's one in which workers have some agency.
Contrast that with driving for Uber: Uber decides which drivers get to even see a job. Uber decides how to market its services. Uber gets to set fares, on a per-passenger basis, meaning that it might choose to scare some passengers off of a few of their rides with high prices, in a bid to psychologically nudge that passenger into accepting higher fares overall.
At the same time, Uber is reliant on a minimum pool of drivers cruising the streets, on the clock but off the payroll. If riders had to wait 45 minutes to get an Uber, they'd make other arrangements. If it happened too often, they'd delete the app. So Uber can't survive without those cruising, unpaid drivers, who provide the capacity that make the company commercially viable.
What's more, livery cab drivers aren't the only comparators for gig-work platforms. Many gig workers deliver food, meaning that we should compare them to, say, pizza delivery drivers. These drivers aren't just paid when they have a pizza in the car and they're driving to a customer's home. They're paid from the moment they clock onto their shift to the moment they clock off (plus tips).
Now, obviously, this is more expensive for employers, but the Uber Eats arrangement – in which drivers are only paid when they've got a pizza in the car and they're en route to a customer – doesn't eliminate that expense. When a gig delivery company takes away the pay that drivers used to get while waiting for a pizza, they're shifting this expense from employers to workers:
The fact that Uber can manipulate the concept of a minimum wage in order to claim to pay $21.12/hour to drivers who are making $2.50 per hour creates all kinds of policy distortions.
Take Seattle: in 2024, the city implemented a program called "PayUp" that sets a "minimum wage" for drivers, but it's not a real minimum wage. It's a minimum payment for every ride or delivery.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzes the program and concludes that it hasn't increased drivers' pay at all:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545
To which we might say, "Duh." Cranking up the sum paid for a small fraction of the work you do for a company will have very little impact on the overall wage you receive from the company.
However, there is an interesting wrinkle in this paper's conclusions. Drivers aren't earning less under this system, either. So they're getting paid more for every delivery, but they're not adding more deliveries to their day. In other words, they're doing less work and then clocking off:
A neoclassical economist (someone who has experienced a specific form of neurological injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power) would say that this means that the drivers only desire to earn the sums they were earning before the "minimum wage" and so the program hasn't made a difference to their lives.
But anyone else can look at this situation and understand that drivers only did this shitty job out of desperation. They had a sum they needed to get every month in order to pay the rent or the grocery bill. They have lots of needs besides those that they would like to fulfill, but not under the shitty gig-work app conditions. The only reason they tolerate a shitty app as their shitty boss at all is that they are desperate, and that desperation gives gig companies power over their workers.
In other words, Seattle's PayUp "minimum wage" has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.
So PayUp isn't a wash – it has changed the distributional outcome of the gig-work economy in Seattle. Drivers have clawed back a surplus – time they can spend doing more productive or pleasant things than cruising and waiting for a booking – from their bosses, who now must face lower profits, either from a loss of business from impatient customers, or from a higher wage they must pay to get those wait-times down again.
But if you want to really move the needle on gig workers' wages, the answer is simple: pay workers for all the hours they put in for their bosses, not just the ones where bosses decide they deserve to get paid for.
How to GM Romance is out! There's a couple of illustrations of mine in the manual (which you can grab here! click!) It was a pleasure to work on these <3
I've mentioned some of this before, but it's time I put it in one post. Here're interesting encounters I've had with the public while doing gig work.
- Guy wearing a suit and a Rolex who bragged about leaving me a "really good tip" (the tip was $7).
- Customer who didn't want their M&Ms because the packaging was the Supporting Women edition.
- Occasional orders that really stand out, like the cheddar cheese and sex toy guy, or the milk, Monster energy, and Plan B girl.
- Just fulfilling ridiculous orders, like delivering over 45 gal / 350 lbs worth of soda or 2,000 Otter Pops to a house (the guy who answered the door for the Otter Pops had no idea he was getting a delivery and was extremely confused and had to have a conversation with his gf about the Otter Pops).
- Multiple instances of college kids who didn't know their own address.
- Showed up to deliver to a hotel room and a woman was sitting on the ground in front of the door. Tried to hand her the order and she said that she didn't order anything. Texted customer, confirmed room, asked woman if it was her hotel room and she said no. Told her I needed to deliver to that room but she wouldn't move. Texted customer to tell them a random woman was sitting in front of their door blocking the delivery, so they opened the door looking very confused and she wandered away.
- Lady who thought any eggs that aren't brown are fake eggs.
- Delivery notes that say shit like "don't knock or ring, just scream as loud as possible when ur here."
- Nudist guy with delivery note that said, "I am a nudist, I will answer the door naked, male driver only as a female may be uncomfortable."
- Showed up to a "restaurant" for pick up and it was an apartment that someone was illegally running a kitchen out of.
- Costco security calling for backup because a guy was doing a drug deal in front of the main entrance.
- Transphobe Cis Het Man in a cowboy hat trying to corner me in a public restroom.
- Delivering to an apartment complex where EMTs were taking away a dead body.
A new poll from Securian Canada shows nearly one-quarter of Canadians surveyed participate in the gig economy.
This article is from October 2024
Many Canadians are turning to gig work to supplement their income and meet the rising cost of living, according to a new report assessing their insurance needs from insurance provider Securian Canada.
The poll conducted in collaboration with the Angus Reid Institute found that nearly a quarter of respondents participate in gig work, defined as short-term jobs or tasks that do not guarantee steady work.
[...]
Racialized people are more likely to be gig workers than white people, the survey found. Of the Canadians surveyed, 32 per cent of racialized respondents participated in the gig economy, while 20 per cent of white respondents were gig workers.
[...]
While workers are turning to freelance or contract jobs to supplement their income, Fuller said it's employers who are driving a larger shift toward gig work.
She said employers have been less inclined to hire permanent workers, who come with costs, like benefits or pensions.
"There's been this attempt to reclassify workers either as temporary workers or as self-employed independent contractors so that employers don't need to bear responsibilities to workers," she said. "This is really an employer-driven phenomenon."
OK, I'm in a good mood today, and Uber is going all right considering I'm making good money off it - even having a record-breaking day yesterday.
Having said that, I'm a bit worried because a couple of Fridays ago, I had a woman who was literally THE WORST UBER PASSENGER I EVER HAD. So, the Uber app told me to take her from my state's largest airport to a hotel in the capital, but when we were close to the destination, she said I was going the wrong way and claimed she wanted to go elsewhere, even falsely accusing me of putting in the wrong destination in the GPS. For those of you who have never been Uber drivers, I really have no control over the destination in the GPS, and I was LITERALLY just doing my job. I politely told her that if she wanted a new route, then 1. I could drop her off at the destination that the Uber app told me to drop her off at, and she could get a new driver, or 2. She could update it in the app. Unfortunately, she rudely refused both options and instead insisted upon using her GPS to take me to the "right" address. Me having anger issues that got me in trouble in other jobs, I didn't want to get in a screaming match with her, so I just did what she wanted, though 1. I told her that I am autistic and that her behavior was unacceptable, and 2. I gave her a one-star rating and blocked her.
Anyways, after that, not only did she give me a one-star rating that harshly impacted my driver score, but she falsely reported me for "yelling and cursing" at her when I did no such thing, so I had to log in to the app and submit an explanation of what happened to appeal the report (I wasn't recording rides at the time, but now I know better). Also, Uber sent me a threatening E-mail over my driver score (which, honestly, they should relax their standards over).
I'm also going to skip over the part where this woman was an old, privileged White woman to get to the reason why I'm telling this story: I need advice on any other good ways to make money should I get unjustly banned from Uber's driver app. I have two jobs that I'm awaiting a disposition on - one of which I had a successful interview and am awaiting the physical/drug test results for - but I have severe anxiety about getting rejected for both of those, and I really, REALLY could use the money. Just a disclaimer, though: please, DON'T suggest that I start trading stocks. 1. Some rude, ignorant fellow on Reddit (aren't they all, though?) suggested that, and 2. I'm not trying to become rich. I just need enough money to survive and to indulge in my hobbies.
Oh, and one other thing: I also have the GrubHub driver app, but they were supposed to send me a free insulated bag to put food in and they never did, hence why I never tried it.
