This essay was supposed to be about cleaning. I have a family history of cleaning work. My mom housekept and minded the front desk at a Holiday Inn throughout my childhood. My grandmother carried my brother to meet my dad at the office where he had a cleaning job; they all worked together to make good time. There is a long history of immigrant women, particularly Latina women, performing domestic labor, including cleaning work, in our society.1 I planned to write about their experiences of the gig economy’s fast creep from ridesharing and food delivery into industries as varied as retail and hotel cleaning. I hoped to trace my family’s work through the technological transformation of our economy, as jobs like house, hotel, and office cleaning become “gigified” through platform app companies like Instawork, Qwick, and GigSmart.
To recruit interviewees for this essay, I posted a job application to clean my house on one of the growing number of websites that match hospitality, cleaning, warehousing, and retail employers with gig workers. On GigSmart, 138 workers applied to my job in just seventeen days. As I reviewed applicants’ résumés, I realized the people doing house cleaning gigs today are not the trade housekeepers of yesterday. Speaking to several of these workers from GigSmart revealed a much more complex picture than that of hotel cleaners transitioning to on-demand shifts as gig corporations encroach into their industry. What I found were three myths that undergird the gig economy at large—false narratives about companies like Uber, DoorDash, and GigSmart that benefit those corporations, at the expense of consumers and workers alike.
I. The Work Is Not a “Gig”
The first myth that buttresses the gig economy is in its name: the word “gig.” “Gig” is a word that was first used to describe jazz acts at clubs in the ’20s—a far cry from the type of work that 41 million people in the US engage with today. Today, for most, gig work is not a fun hobby, an optional extracurricular, or a side hustle to earn extra pocket money. In fact, for more than two-thirds of workers on these apps, the job is a full-time haul. Most gig workers I spoke to work overtime, meaning the patchwork of jobs from apps they can cobble together often overtakes the forty hours we typically associate with a workweek.
The eight-hour workday was a hard-won victory by labor organizers of yesterday. Today, gig corporations are actively undermining those victories. In Hustle and Gig, sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle details past labor struggles that afforded many workers protections like the forty-hour workweek. She puts gig workers’ exclusion from these protections plainly: “Gig economy workers are often second class citizens in the labor world, denied many of the same rights taken for granted by workers in the mainstream economy.”
Shawnta, one GigSmart worker I interviewed, is active on four different apps—Instawork, GigSmart, Wonolo, and WorkWhile—through which she does a range of work, from housekeeping to birthday party setup to warehousing. She told me she clocks in about fifty to sixty hours each week. Jay, another GigSmart worker, similarly has done gigs as diverse as college food service and even a dinosaur-suit performance. They don’t particularly enjoy the jobs, and wouldn’t recommend them to friends, but admit, “It’s a good thing if you need fifty bucks today.”
Gig workers turn to the work because they don’t have much other choice for one or many reasons, including their immigration status, limitations on time and energy from their primary or day jobs, caregiving duties, or because their desired or former profession has been subsumed by the gig corporations themselves. Gig work thus preys on migrants, the poor working class, the ill, and their caretakers, many of whom are also Black and Latinx. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 42 percent of workers for gig companies are Black and Latinx, even though the two populations make up less than 29 percent of the workforce. Sixty-six percent of the workers who applied to my job on GigSmart were Black, including Jay and Shawnta.2
Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job at UPS as a data entry clerk because she had too many family health appointments to attend to. Her younger brother is autistic with a brain aneurysm. Her mother has problems with her knees and circulation. Her sister, after a bad accident, has a knee injury. She also sustains scoliosis and is currently managing an addiction to opioids. Shawnta herself has health issues to manage; she has Grave’s disease, a thyroid condition that causes her weight to fluctuate and brought on early menopause at the age of only thirty-three. While juggling medical appointments for four family members, including herself, it is no wonder that Shawnta cannot hold down a full-time job. That’s why she turned to the gig economy—though the twelve-hour warehousing shifts she picks up through the apps could hardly be called part time.
Amber, the third GigSmart worker I interviewed, has a disability. Six years ago, she was paralyzed. A UTI had spread, moving to and causing masses to grow in her spinal cord. Amber is still experiencing symptoms from the paralysis today and now has a new ailment that she has yet to be able to diagnose. She is currently on disability assistance but needs to work to supplement it. However, she cannot work a full-time job because of her current physical illness. For Amber, the “gig” is a necessity.
Yet it behooves the companies to maintain that their workers are part of the “gig” economy. It affords them positive connotations with the word “gig” (flexible, independent) and allows them to continue to shirk their responsibilities as employers to their workers. Corporations considered part of the gig economy misclassify their workers as independent contractors, circumventing legal obligations to provide benefits and protections.
II. Gig Companies Are Not Tech Companies
Thus, we encounter the second myth of the gig economy: despite their insistence that they are technology-driven companies, gig companies are not high-tech corporations. Edward Ongweso Jr., a writer who covers the gig economy, and the European Court of Justice agree: Uber, one of the first gig corporations in the industry, is “just another taxi company.” Uber’s premier innovation was not in connecting taxis with riders, which taxi companies had successfully done for decades. Rather, Uber’s real innovation was relieving itself from employer status, thereby abandoning its responsibilities to its drivers. This is, in fact, gig corporations’ primary innovation: the misclassification model, which deprives workers of job security, benefits, and protections on the job, including the right to organize. Silicon Valley excels in absolving itself of blame from any harm the technology it creates inflicts on people or the planet; Uber and Lyft’s insistence that they are not employers is the same play in a different costume. It is an entirely self-serving ploy to get these corporations off the hook for any liability or accountability to their workers.
This disruption of the labor model pushes people into deep economic insecurity. Shawnta, despite working fifty to sixty hours on GigSmart and other apps each week, doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to pay her bills next week. She receives public assistance (a mere $68.50 every two weeks), as well as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. She hates living in “the projects,” as she calls them. “It’s depressing,” she admits, and laments having to share a two-bedroom apartment with her two sons, aged twenty-four and twenty-eight—but prefers this housing situation to the alternative: being unhoused and in a shelter, as she was just six years ago. Shawnta’s older son drives for Uber but can’t make rent on his own because he’s also forced to lease the car through the company—a predatory scheme that persists despite its economic unviability for workers.
Jay is grappling with their own economic insecurity. They admitted partway into our interview that they are currently living out of their car—“car camping,” as Jay would say.
Amber has been in a women’s shelter since she arrived in New York three months ago.
Amber, Jay, and Shawnta are not alone in their precarity. Forty percent of gig workers in New York, 37 percent in Seattle, and 30 percent in the Bay Area rely on public assistance through Medicaid. Forty percent of gig workers in New York also receive SNAP benefits—three times higher than the share of other self-employed workers and employees who rely on the food assistance program. A nationwide survey of gig workers in 2020 found that one in five gig workers had gone hungry because they couldn’t afford food, and nearly one-third of gig workers couldn’t pay their full utility bill amount in the month before the survey.
While there are several studies that illustrate the economic precarity of gig workers, what’s still under-researched is how gig companies’ lack of transparency exacerbates unstable and impoverished working conditions. Accessing research on this topic is difficult by design: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig corporations are notoriously opaque because they benefit from information asymmetries, and thus power asymmetries, against workers, consumers, and the public. To fight back against one of these asymmetries, the Colorado Independent Drivers United is organizing to pass a bill that would require rideshare apps to show customers how much the driver and the company are receiving from their fare and, crucially, to show drivers the fare, distance, and direction of a ride before they are forced to accept one. This basic information will empower drivers with information to continue organizing toward fair rideshare rates and give individual drivers an informed choice about whether to accept rides––a fundamental exercise of worker power of which rideshare drivers have been, to date, deprived.
The technology that corporations like Uber and GigSmart use is to the benefit of the corporation, and the detriment of workers. Through this technology, gig companies surveil workers’ every movement, commit algorithmic wage discrimination, and ruthlessly punish workers through deactivations. In fact, unfair deactivations are among the most salient pain points of gig workers––especially among drivers of color. In a 2023 survey of gig rideshare drivers, 69 percent of drivers of color experienced some form of deactivation, compared to 57 percent of drivers who identify as white.
Jay has experienced firsthand deactivations from Instawork, just for being ill. They told me:
There’s no option to cancel twelve hours [before a shift] without penalty. Sometimes I waited too long because I thought I would go in, but then I’m like, “You should not power through this. You’re about to cough up a lung. Or at least a tonsil. You should not be around food.”
By caring for the health of others, Jay was punished. They recalled,
The last time I drove to the college to be like, “Hey, I’m reporting for my shift, but I shouldn’t be here. I’m very sick and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” he didn’t cancel the shift, which got a mark against my account. That happened maybe once or twice. Then I got kicked off the platform.
Shawnta recalled an instance in which she couldn’t make her shift to a warehouse three hours away from her—trains were shut down during a harsh storm. As a penalty, Shawnta received a “breach point.” This barred her from applying to gigs on one of the apps for thirty days, effectively barring her from earning an income for a month—a draconian punishment for a situation wholly outside her control.
Amber was also blocked from Instawork and has yet to be able to find out why.
This level of punitive discipline is not unlike public assistance “sanctions,” or penalties for supposed noncompliance with requirements of such programs. Over time, the US has dropped state requirements for “conciliation processes,” or methods of recourse that allow beneficiaries to appeal sanctions. The lack of such a process is reminiscent of the lack of due process and appeal to which gig workers are subject—and against which they are fighting back.
III. The Gig Economy Wants You
The third myth of the gig economy is that it is a self-contained entity. In reality, the gig economy bleeds and butts further into the rest of the economy each day. The misclassification model is cheaper and easier to sustain for employers, in part because it allows them to pass on their burden of compensation to state social safety net programs in the same way low-wage employers (like Walmart, McDonald’s, and Amazon) do. It is no surprise, then, that employers in new industries are feeling its pull. Virtually no job is safe from the encroachment of the gig work model: gig corporations are misclassifying healthcare workers and educators alike.
As a result, the number and kind of gig apps only continue to grow and diversify. While the dominant firms in the industry remain rideshare and food delivery apps, consider the countless apps there are specifically for jobs ranging from pet sitting to plumbing (see Rover and Handy, respectively). Newer gig apps like Instawork, Qwick, and GigSmart attract a well-rounded pool of workers ready for a varied set of jobs, ranging from hospitality to warehousing. Non-gig work jobs, too, are increasingly subject to the threat of “precarization,” similar to that of gigification. Academia, for example, dumps the burden of the important work of educating onto precarious workers like adjuncts, who are subject to declining pay, reduced benefits and protections, and lack of voice and organized power on the job.
The expansion of the gig-misclassification model poses a threat not only to individuals but also to worker rights at large. As a prime example, labor union Unite Here’s strikes in the Los Angeles area were recently broken by hotels who hired workers through Instawork in a ploy to fill the jobs that strikers abandoned—all unbeknownst to the hired gig workers.
What’s more, the gig economy’s employment model can be isolating for workers who may not only crave the camaraderie and community of a shared workplace and workforce but also may want to organize. The solitary nature of gig work, intentionally designed by gig corporations to be facilitated through the app without human interactions, makes it difficult for workers to get together, talk about their issues, and take action to fight for better conditions. Even if workers could overcome these barriers and attempt to take collective action, workers in the gig economy are not afforded protections from the right to organize, because of their legal “independent contractor” status (i.e., the misclassification model).
Despite these challenges, gig workers are fighting back. Workers on these apps have been organizing across the country for over a decade, and their resultant victories abound. As of writing, Minneapolis’s city council, after years of worker activism, passed a minimum pay standard for the rideshare industry, and, in a petty act of retaliation, Uber and Lyft claimed they would leave the city. Instead of kowtowing to their interests after the corporations’ tantrum, the city announced it is considering funding small-business alternatives to the rideshare companies. In New York City, as a result of worker-led organizing campaigns like Los Deliveristas Unidos, the municipal government passed a minimum pay standard for food delivery workers on gig apps. Committees of gig app workers are active and organizing in Chicago, the DC area, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and more. Thousands across some of these cities went on strike this past Valentine’s Day. Their demands include a living wage, transparency over pay, and an end to unfair deactivations from the platform. Most of these organizing efforts are not driven by a unionization effort; because of their “independent contractor” employment status, gig workers are not entitled to the right to unionize.
In the meantime, for both Jay and Amber, the “gig” fills a need they can’t afford not to take advantage of. When asked if they would take on a full-time job again, Jay replied,
I wouldn’t go back to, as I call them, regular, regular jobs. I wouldn’t do that. Just because I’m an artist. I’m an artist of the theater. That is my being, my calling. That’s all I have to be in order to survive and want to breathe.
Amber, who is also an artist, told me she would even recommend GigSmart to her friends. She said, “I don’t want to live off the government. I work so hard at getting things together.” Working on GigSmart is helping her do that. Amber and Jay share this reality with other gig workers: they accept gig work because it’s the best they can find given their limitations. It’s the best option that exists.
Structurally, aspects of gig work make it inherently accessible to more people. In this way, the gig economy accepts workers that traditional employers have rejected, welcoming workers regardless of (dis)ability, health, entanglement with the social safety net, incarceration history, immigration status, (self-)caretaking work, or need to work multiple jobs.
Thus, our mandate is not simply to convert gig work into traditional full-time work. Rather, our mandate is to reenvision what a job means, does, and provides. We must build a world not only where we convert what Ravenelle calls the “second-class citizen” (i.e., gig worker) into the “first class”; we must also reimagine what “first class” means, making it inclusive of those who are not accepted in the formal economy. We can reject the gig work model, which segregates a class of workers wading through structural precarity, discrimination, racism, and a revolving door through public assistance. At the same time, we must address the discriminatory nature of the formal full-time employment model. We can and must build better ways of work and living that can accommodate workers’ needs, constraints, desires, and also provide them with a stable, secure, and dignified life.
I wish these pathways existed for my family when we were juggling multiple jobs, including cleaning—only to continue being mired in debt and economic disarray. That is why, in memory and honor of my father, grandmother, and mother, I work to build a better world with a plentitude of dignified work opportunities. Building that better world is something we can do only together, by organizing through solidarity across workers and consumers. To start, we must develop a clear-eyed view of the “gig economy” and recognize its myths for the corporate scams they are.
1. See Teresa Carrillo, “Latinas in Domestic Service,” Latino Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Erin Speiser et al., “Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviors of Latinas in Cleaning Occupations in Northern New Jersey: A Cross-Sectional Mixed Methods Study,” Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology 16, no. 1 (December 2021); Donald E. Eggerth et al., “Work Experiences of Latino Building Cleaners: An Exploratory Study,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 62, no. 7 (May 2019): 600–608.
2. Figures based on author’s independent calculations.