Plan B Forum

Pixel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In the Gig Economy

For one month, I became the “micro-entrepreneur” touted by companies like TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Airbnb. Instead of the labor revolution I had been promised, all I found was hard work, low pay, and a system that puts workers at a disadvantage.

By Sarah Kessler

"If I'm willing to pay $100 for someone to bring me a glass of fresh milk from an Omaha dairy cow right now, there might very well be a guy who would be super happy to do that, but he doesn't know that I'm the crazy guy who is willing to pay $100.” Bo Fishback was on stage at the "Big Omaha” startup conference in 2011, trying to explain how his company Zaarly was designed to make that connection between the person with more money than time and anyone who, finding themselves in the opposite situation, could fulfill his hankering for local farm products. "It creates instantly the ultimate opt-in employment market, where there is no excuse for people who say, ‘I don't know how to get a job, I don't know how to get started.'” Fishback wrapped up his presentation with a flourish: A man in a baseball cap arrived, cow in tow, with a tall plastic jug of milk.

Neither Fishback nor I realized at the time that he was the first person to pitch the vision I would hear many more times over the next three years: The gig economy (a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy) represents a theory of the future of work that's a viable alternative to laboring for corporate America. Instead of selling your soul to the Man, it goes, you are empowered to work for yourself on a project-by-project basis. One day it might be delivering milk, but the next it's building Ikea furniture, driving someone to the airport, hosting a stranger from out of town in your spare bedroom, or teaching a class on a topic in which you're an expert. The best part? The work will come to you, via apps on your smartphone, making the process of finding work as easy as checking your Twitter feed.

Whatever you do, it will be your choice. Because you are no longer just an employee with set hours and wages working to make someone else rich. In the future, you will be your very own mini-business.

The vision is so intoxicating that even as the U.S. unemployment rate remained stubbornly high, with millions of long-term unemployed dropping off the rolls and untold millions more underemployed, the gig economy came to offer not just a path to freedom from our desks but also a way to get the American people back to work. In a TED talk, Rachel Botsman, author of What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, described sharing economy companies as "lemonade stands on steroids.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece headlined "How To Monetize Your Closet” that argued "these entrepreneurs are not the only answer for our economic woes...but they are surely part of the answer.”

The people running these new companies have made grand pronouncements as well. When challenged by city hotel laws, Brian Chesky, CEO and cofounder of Airbnb, told the Wall Street Journal that "I want to live in a world where people can become entrepreneurs or micro-entrepreneurs and if we can lower the friction and inspire them to do that, especially in an economy like today, this is the promise of the sharing economy." And in 2012 when PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel's Founders Fund led a $13 million investment round in the errand platform called TaskRabbit, its CEO Leah Busque told TechCrunch that the company's goal was to "revolutionize the world's labor force.”

The only problem with this narrative is that the prospects of finding a living wage in America do not seem any brighter than they did back in 2008 when Busque founded TaskRabbit. Unemployment has drifted down from its high of 10% in October 2009 to 6.6% in the January 2014 report, but income inequality is, according to research based on tax-return data from the IRS, the worst it has been since 1923.