The full-time job is disappearing. Today more workers than ever are going freelance – driving for Uber or cycling for Deliveroo, developing software or consulting for investment banks. Welcome to the gig economy.
In Gigged, Sarah Kessler meets the people forging this new world of unorthodox employment: from the computer programmer who chooses exactly which hours he works each week, via the Uber driver who is trying to convince his peers to unionise, to the charity worker who thinks freelance gigs might just transform the fortunes of a declining rural town.
Their stories raise crucial questions about the future of work. What happens when job security, holidays and benefits become a thing of the past? How can freelancers find meaningful, well-paid employment? And could the gig economy really change the world of work for ever?
Sarah Kessler is a deputy editor at Quartz, where she writes about the future of work. She was previously senior associate editor at Fast Company and before that associate editor at Mashable. Her writing has appeared in publications including Inc., Salon, and USA Today.
‘Essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding the future of our economy and society.’ Ha-Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
‘Sarah Kessler’s wonderful book offers unprecedented illumination of the promise, and the peril, of the gig economy.’ Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots
‘If you want to know how work is changing and how you too must change to keep up, you must read this book.’ Dan Lyons, author of Disrupted
‘Deep reporting and graceful storytelling … Kessler’s analysis is both astute and nuanced.’ Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473537507
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Sarah Kessler has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by Random House Business Books in 2018
First published in the United States by St Martin’s Press in 2018
Random House Business Books
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ISBN 9781847941732
For my family:
Debra, Steve, Richard,
and Alex
When I first heard about the “future of work” in 2011, I was working as a reporter at a tech blog—a job that involved wading through an endless stream of startup pitches.
This future, dozens of young entrepreneurs explained to me, didn’t involve jobs. Nobody liked jobs: The boredom! The rigid structure! The obedience! What the world really needed were gigs.
The pitch came in different versions. Some startups had created ecommerce stores for labor. Small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike could sift through worker profiles by skill and hire them on a project-by-project basis. Other startups worked more like dispatchers. Drivers, dog walkers, and errand runners could get notifications on their phones when a job became available and choose to either accept it or reject it. A small handful of companies had taken a third approach, breaking work into tiny tasks that took only minutes and paid only cents. They assigned online crowds of people to work on large, tedious projects, like transcribing audiotapes, or checking to make sure that grocery stores across the country remembered to put a certain brand of cola in a prime location.
The rise of these new apps, their founders assured me, meant that soon we would all be working on the projects we chose, during the hours that we wanted. We would no longer be laboring for the man, but for our own tiny businesses. This meant that in the future, it wouldn’t matter how many jobs got shipped overseas or were taken by robots. We could work for our neighbors, connect with as many projects as we needed to get by, and fit those gigs in between our band rehearsals, gardening, and other passion projects. It would be more than the end of unemployment. It would be the end of drudgery.
The idea was deeply appealing to me. In addition to sounding like more fun than a job, this version of the future of work relieved a deep uncertainty I had about the future.
From a young age, my baby boomer parents had instilled in me that the mission of becoming an adult—the path to dignity, security, and independence—was to obtain a job. Most adults I knew in my rural Wisconsin town had a straightforward profession like teacher, lawyer, or mechanic. They worked at the grocery store or for the postal service. A large Nestlé factory in a town nearby made the air smell like chocolate if the wind blew just right, and another factory made Kikkoman soy sauce. Becoming employable—not following dreams, seeking some sort of personal fulfillment, or whatever it is they tell kids in coastal states—was in itself deserving of respect and dignity.
So eager was I to become a real person, a person with a job, that I’d spent a good chunk of my summer vacation before high school at a greenhouse, picking aphids off of herbs and pulling the hard-to-reach weeds (being 13, I was skinny enough to squeeze between plant stands). My parents didn’t need the money. I didn’t need the money. Jobs just felt instinctively important.
I’m told most millennials don’t feel that way, but I haven’t really met many people in general who don’t value stability and safety. Maybe what makes millennials different is that those things feel particularly elusive. My peers and I came of age at a time when everything everyone believed about work was at best in flux and at worst already clearly no longer the case.
In 2005, when I was a junior in high school, I decided I would become a journalist. In 2007, as newsrooms were scrambling to move their business models online, the Great Recession started. And three years after that, the winter of my senior year of college, the unemployment rate in the United States hit double digits. Only the computer programmers, it seemed, were excited for graduation. As I conjured a frantic storm of resumes, informational interviews, and job fair mailing lists, I had trouble sleeping and, at times, breathing. Though at the time I was narrowly focused on my own employment prospects (or lack thereof), my anxiety was small by comparison to many. I had a college degree, parents willing to help me, and connections at a local greenhouse that would have been happy to have me back for another summer. I was going to be ok. About the future, the world around me, I wasn’t so sure.
Media wasn’t the only industry being remade by technology. As newsrooms were announcing layoffs, other companies were using internet freelance marketplaces and staffing agencies to zap white-collar jobs overseas. Artificial intelligence and robotics were replacing others. Many of the jobs that remained in the United States no longer came with security. Companies had, under pressure from shareholders, cut the fat from their benefits packages for employees, piling more and more risk onto their shoulders. As the economy recovered, the companies hired temp workers, contract workers, freelancers, seasonal workers, and part-time workers, but full-time jobs that had been lost to the recession were never coming back. Between 2005 and 2015, nearly all of the jobs added to the US economy would fall into the “contingent” category.1 That “job” that we’d all been told was the key to our secure life no longer seemed like a natural path.
As a young person, you’re not allowed to sit out the future. You don’t get to put off learning how to use email because you’d rather fax. Nobody thinks that’s endearing. When you see a trend coming down the pike, you know it’s going to hit you. So perhaps when entrepreneurs described for me a world in which work would be like shopping at a bazaar (a gig economy startup had picked up this concept in its name, Zaarly), it appealed to me more than it would have to someone with more gray hairs: I’ll take that vision of the future—no need to play that horrifying mass unemployment and poverty vision that I had all lined up and ready to go.
I wrote my first story about the gig economy in 2011, long before anyone had labeled it the “gig economy.” The headline was “Online Odd Jobs: How Startups Let You Fund Yourself.”2 Though my job changed throughout the next seven years, my fascination with the gig economy didn’t. I first watched as the gig economy became a venture capital feeding frenzy, a hot new topic and a ready answer to the broader economy’s problems. Then, as stories of worker exploitation emerged, I listened as the same companies that had once boasted about creating the “gig economy” worked to distance themselves from the term. I saw the gig economy start a much-needed conversation about protecting workers as technology transforms work.
The more I learned, the more I understood that the startup “future of work” story, as consoling as it was, was also incomplete. Yes, the gig economy could create opportunity for some people, but it also could amplify the same problems that made the world of work look so terrifying in the first place: insecurity, increased risk, lack of stability, and diminishing workers’ rights. The gig economy touched many people. Some of them were rich, some poor, some had power, and some didn’t. Its impact on each of them was different.
The chapters of this book alternate between five of their stories. It’s not intended to be a complete, bird’s-eye view of the gig economy. Any economy is built by humans, and this book is about them.
AT SOUTH BY Southwest 2011, the napkins featured QR codes. Flyers rained down from party balconies, and the grilled cheese—provided by group messaging app GroupMe—was free.
Startups looked forward to the tech-focused “Interactive” portion of the famous music festival in Austin, Texas, like a popular high school student looks forward to the prom. One of the new companies among them, it was widely assumed, would be crowned a “breakout hit,” just as Twitter had once “broken out” by introducing its app to the tech-savvy SXSW crowd. It was only a matter of attracting enough attention—an effort that usually involved a marketing gimmick.
At the time, Uber was a little-known app that worked as a dispatch service for local owners of licensed private car companies. Its attempt at guerrilla marketing was an on-demand pedicab service.
The startup decorated 100 rented pedicabs with banners that said “I U” next to a solid black shape of Texas (“I Uber Texas,” I suppose), and in interviews with bloggers, its executives hopefully suggested that riders post photos of themselves with the hashtag #Uberspotting. “If you’re an Uber virgin, prepare to experience the future of transportation,” its blog explained, helpfully noting that the process of calling an Uber pedicab would be easy to navigate “even when drunk.”
Within a few short years, Uber would become one of the most valuable companies in the world. It would allow anyone—not just the professional drivers with which it had begun—to earn money as a taxi driver, and its fares (then $15 at minimum) would drop so low that in some cities they’d compete with public transportation. The startup would raise more than $12 billion in venture capital funding at a valuation that made it, on paper, worth more than 100-year-old companies like GM and Ford, and the Uber business model would give rise to an entire category of startups. The transportation service would also set a new expectation among consumers: that everything should come to them “on demand,” at the push of a button—an idea that would reshape service industries, retail, and digital interface design.
But at SXSW 2011, Uber just looked like yet another dream.
At the time, I was working as a reporter at a tech blog. My list of “13 Potential Breakout Apps to Watch at SXSW 2011,”1 published the week before the festival, featured four group messaging apps, an app that turned a cell phone into a walkie-talkie (because I somehow thought walkie-talkies were better than phones?), and two nearly identical photo-sharing apps (one of which was Instagram). Uber didn’t make the cut.
I wasn’t alone in ignoring Uber. Despite its earnest attempt at social media marketing, only about five of SXSW Interactive’s nearly 20,000 attendees that year participated in #Uber-spotting.
Uber attracted nearly as little attention a year later with an offer to deliver barbecue to SXSW attendees. The hype that year instead surrounded an app called Highlight, which made phones buzz when strangers in the same proximity had mutual friends and interests, as determined by their social media accounts. “The way we find people has been terribly inefficient,” Highlight’s founder told me earnestly in an interview.2 “We don’t realize how horrible it is because it’s always been that way.” He was dead serious about human interaction being broken, and his pitch for fixing it with an app was quite effective. The Highlight hype became so pervasive that at one panel I attended, a waggish moderator instituted a fake drinking game: “Every time Highlight is mentioned, drink twice … and then punch yourself.” Nobody, by contrast, was talking about Uber.
I had so little expectation of Uber becoming a mainstream utility that when I took my Uber-sponsored pedicab ride, I used my work email address to sign up for the app. I didn’t want my personal email account to get spam.
It wasn’t for another two years, by which time Highlight had been all but forgotten, that Uber finally emerged as a darling of Silicon Valley. Its “breakout” had nothing to do with a marketing stunt.
In 2013, the company raised a $258 million round of funding led by Google’s investment arm, Google Ventures—an amount that Gawker’s tech blog called “stupefying.”3
The $258 million investment seemed remarkable partly because Uber had so little in common with the hot apps of the time, those for sharing photos, turning phones into walkie-talkies, or making social connections on the street. Though some of these “potential breakout apps” sound trivial or silly in retrospect, they all had the potential to become quickly and massively profitable—Instagram and Snapchat both emerged from this period—which isn’t the case for most companies. By the time Facebook bought Instagram, the most successful of my “2011 breakout apps,” for $1 billion in 2012, the photo-sharing service had 30 million users but only 13 employees, including its cofounders. That’s more than $75 million of value per person.
Venture capitalists love companies that scale massively with as little infrastructure as Instagram. They generally ignore companies that grow slowly and sustainably over time, which, until around 2013, included most companies that sold in-person services like transportation.
Uber, though, was changing the game. Instead of buying cars or hiring employees, it made two apps: one for customers, one for drivers. When a customer requested a ride, Uber sent a notification to a nearby driver, who used his own car to do the job. Uber handled payments and charged a commission. All it needed to grow was the same thing that Instagram needed to grow: app downloads. The startup had figured out how to scale an analog service company as though it were a software company.
Uber avoided medallions, special license plates, and other government-created systems aimed at regulating taxi and limousine companies by claiming that it was a technology company rather than a transportation company. This would soon cause a dramatic confrontation between itself and regulators. But another key to the startup’s seemingly endless potential for growth was—as important, powerful things so often are—extremely boring, at least at surface level. It was essentially a tax classification.
Uber had called its drivers “independent contractors.” This relieved the company from government-mandated employer responsibilities in most countries, and in the United States, where Uber started, it relieved the company of almost all of them. Workers who are classified as “employees” must be paid while they take coffee breaks and must be treated according to anti-discrimination laws. They come with commitments to contribute to government safety net programs for retirement and unemployment benefits. And they can be difficult to fire when business circumstances change.
Independent contractors come with none of these responsibilities. They also do not have the right to unionize under US federal collective bargaining laws, and there’s no requirement to provide them with training, equipment to do the job, or benefits.4 The situation is similar, albeit to a lesser extent, elsewhere. UK employers, for instance, do not need to offer sick days, holiday pay, a guaranteed minimum wage, or other benefits to self-employed contractors.
When a driver signed up to work for Uber as an independent contractor, he or she (but most likely he, as 81% of US drivers, as of December 2015, were men5) supplied his own car, gas, and overly pungent air fresheners. He paid for his own coffee breaks and his own health insurance. All of the responsibility of being in business, including taxes, rested on his shoulders. An Uber driver, in other words, was as close to a piece of code as Uber could find without having the cars drive themselves (an initiative that quickly became the company’s priority).
It seemed to investors like a smart strategy, but it wasn’t a new one. Decades before Uber started, companies in Silicon Valley had begun shifting work to independent contractors, subcontractors, and temporary workers as a way to reduce cost and liability. As an ad for the temporary staffing agency Kelly Services put it in 1971, the type of worker clients could expect to hire through such an agency:
Never takes a vacation or holiday.
Never asks for a raise.
Never costs you a dime for slack time. (When the workload drops, you drop her.)
Never has a cold, slipped disc or loose tooth. (Not on your time anyway!)
Never costs you for unemployment taxes and Social Security payments. (None of the paperwork, either!)
Never costs you for fringe benefits. (They add up to 30% of every payroll dollar.)
Never fails to please. (If your Kelly Girl employee doesn’t work out, you don’t pay.)6
By 2009, the year Uber launched, nearly all taxi drivers and around 13% of the US population were already self-employed or working as independent contractors. Other alternatives to hiring employees were also on the rise. Around 45% of accountants, 50% of IT workers, and 70% of truck drivers were working for contractors rather than as employees at the companies for which they provided services.7 And the number of temp workers in the United States was on its way to an all-time high. By 2016, 20% to 30% of the working-age population in the United States and European Union had engaged in freelance work.8 Add part-time work to the mix, and some estimates put the percentage of the US workforce that did not have a full-time job as high as 40%.9 Uber merely took a trend among corporations—employing as few people as possible—and adapted it for the smartphone era.
The Uber model worked great for both venture capitalists and customers. Uber’s technology was inarguably a huge improvement over the incumbent system for hailing a ride (which in an era of online shopping and dating apps somehow still involved raising a hand and hoping a cab would pass). Several months after Uber confirmed the massive Google Ventures investment, data about its users leaked to the press. They showed that around 80,000 new customers were signing up for Uber every week (about as many new users as Instagram added per week in late 2010) and suggested the company was on track to make around $210 million by the end of the year.10 Success seemed inevitable.
While any successful startup spawns imitators, with Uber, it felt like a gold rush. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists suddenly wanted to apply the Uber business model to every analog industry that had once seemed too slow for Silicon Valley.
If SXSW was the high school prom of the startup world, TechCrunch was its cheerleader. The tech blog trumpeted each “Uber for X” app’s arrival with headlines such as:
POSTMATES AIMS TO BE
THE UBER OF PACKAGES—AND MORE
WOULD YOU USE AN UBER FOR LAWNCARE?
BLACKJET, THE UBER OF PRIVATE JETS,
RELEASES ITS IPHONE APP
SO I FLEW IN AN “UBER FOR TINY PLANES”
MEET STAT, THE STARTUP THAT WANTS
TO BE UBER FOR MEDICAL TRANSPORT
Startups made Uber for food. Uber for alcohol. Uber for cleaning. Uber for courier services. Uber for massages. Uber for grocery shopping. Uber for car washes. Even Uber for weed. Uber itself hinted that it would take its business model far beyond transportation: “Uber is a cross between lifestyle and logistics,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Bloomberg. “Lifestyle is gimme what I want and give it to me right now and logistics is physically delivering it to the person that wants it … once you’re delivering cars in five minutes, there’s a lot of things you can deliver in 5 minutes.”11 The presumption was that because Uber’s business model worked for calling cars, it could work for any other service, too.
By the end of 2013, 13 startups that described themselves as “Uber for” something had raised venture capital, according to TechCrunch’s funding database. And by 2014, New York Magazine would count an astounding number of “Uber for X” startups—14 separate companies—in the laundry category alone.
Eventually the true independence of the micro-entrepreneurs these businesses relied upon would be challenged in court; workers who felt exploited rather than emancipated by on-demand labor would complicate an otherwise utopian narrative; and what became known as the “gig economy” would attract attention to the ways in which the rest of the economy was unprepared for the future of work.
But at the height of “Uber for X,” few people in the startup world batted an eye. As the then-CEO of the odd job–marketplace TaskRabbit put it, the gig economy was on track to “revolutionize the world’s labor force.”12
BY THE END of 2014, Uber had launched in Paris, Sydney, and London, and its momentum was so strong that Fast Company ran a story headlined “How Uber Conquered the World.”1 The five-year-old startup was launching in a new city nearly every other day. Not just in global cities, but in Flint, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Salt Lake City, Utah—places where cabs have never been prevalent.
Because Uber had few brick-and-mortar offices and no cars, what it launched in each city was essentially a marketing campaign that targeted two distinct audiences: drivers and riders. To the latter, Uber offered free rides—as many as a full two weeks-worth in Kansas City, Missouri, and up to 20 rides in Salt Lake City, Utah—and it partnered with local celebrities, in one case inviting Brandon Knight, a basketball star in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to take the first ride in that city.
To drivers, it sold an idea that was even more powerful than free stuff, which it summarized on a billboard strategically posted near the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s office in New York City: “No shifts. No boss. No limits.”
These six words embodied the basic pitch with which virtually every gig economy company would lure workers in the years that followed. Freedom from the tyranny of the punch clock, the autocratic boss, the finite wages and limited opportunities of the 9-to-5 job. Driving for Uber meant that you were free. Not only free, but an entrepreneur.
The company didn’t rely merely on billboards to spread the message. It set up an affiliate marketing program. Drivers earned a bonus, usually around $200, if they recruited a friend, a bonus structure that would soon become standard elsewhere in the gig economy.2 For some, these bonuses were another appealing aspect of the job. Workers could use them to simultaneously supplement their income from fares and position themselves to others as small business owners, entrepreneurs, and members of the tech class. For a nominal cost, Uber had created a remarkably enthusiastic salesforce.
That’s how Mamdooh Husein became an Uber driver.
A 28-year-old waiter in Kansas City whose mother and everyone else calls “Abe,” he was initially skeptical when one of his coworkers told him about the ride-hailing app. Abe had lived in Kansas City for most of his life, and he had never once had an occasion to take a cab. He couldn’t see how what was essentially a taxi business could work in the city, or how his friend could make the $500 per weekend in profits that he’d reported. He wanted a demonstration.
After work, Abe and his de facto recruiter drove to Kansas City’s main street—a modern downtown strip that looks like an outdoor shopping mall—and turned on the Uber app.
Almost immediately, Uber started routing jobs to the phone, pinging as though golden coins were being collected in a video game.
Maybe Uber wasn’t a scam after all, thought Abe. He would know, as he had fallen for scams before. Most recently, he’d spent thousands of dollars on a pyramid scheme that had promised to help him become a millionaire.
In 2009, he joined a club created by Kevin Trudeau, a famous TV pitchman and the author of a series of books that includes Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About and Recession Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About (there were “debt cures,” “free money,” and a “weight loss cure” that “they” didn’t want you to know about, too). The Trudeau secret that ultimately sent Abe into a financial tailspin was a 14-CD audio lecture called Your Wish Is Your Command: How Anyone Can Make Millions.3
Trudeau advised listeners that they could become millionaires by joining an elite network of individuals that Abe believed included the president of the United States. It bore an impressive name with an intoxicating acronym—the Global Information Network (GIN). At the top of GIN, Trudeau explained, were people in the “inside circle” who ran the show. At the bottom were lowly non-millionaires, those paying to gather the information they needed to advance through “levels.” Advancing through these levels, of course, required recruiting others to the club. And recruiting others to the club involved selling them “tools,” mostly audiobooks, to educate them about GIN and the law of attraction.
Abe didn’t have a girlfriend or many close friends. He’d been raised by a Muslim stepfather and a Christian mother, and he had, on his stepfather’s insistence, been strictly religious growing up—fasting (or at least pretending to fast) during Ramadan and getting up early to pray. Since rejecting Islam, he had spent less time with his parents. The house Abe lived in, which he told me he had purchased after saving for years, felt almost as empty as his life. It contained little furniture, aside from an elaborate security setup (“I live in the hood,” Abe said). He was frugal to the point that he slept on an air mattress.
GIN fed Abe’s ambition and told him that he could be rich and important, without laboring through new education or taking orders from managers who made him feel small. Among its lessons, it advised listeners to follow the “law of attraction,” which involved the same philosophy promoted by the mega-bestseller The Secret: that thinking positive or negative thoughts brings positive or negative experiences into one’s life. That by believing something, you make it happen.
Abe strove obsessively to join GIN’s inside circle. To make it look like he’d met his goal, he signed up fake people, paying special “reduced” promotion fees of $150 on their behalf.
The inner circle, though, never materialized. As one judge would eventually put it, Trudeau was “deceitful to the core.”4 False claims he made while marketing another best-selling book, The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, which encouraged readers to eat just 500 calories per day, would ultimately result in a $37 million penalty from the FTC and a ten-year prison sentence. GIN, it would eventually be revealed, was a $110 million pyramid scheme that had scammed 35,000 members.
After GIN, Abe found himself deeper in debt. By his own estimation, he hadn’t paid back any credit in ten years. In the years after he joined the club, he was sued for debt. He failed to pay his taxes, and a lien was placed on his house. All of which helps explain why he was cautious about new business opportunities.
The Uber pitch felt disturbingly familiar to Abe. The company’s marketing suggested that he could become financially independent—an entrepreneur rather than a mere worker—and induced him to recruit friends.
Uber had created a Delaware-based subsidiary for subprime auto loans, Xchange Leasing, which in 2015 advertised “ALL CREDIT LEVELS ARE ELIGIBLE TO APPLY,” in all caps. After drivers signed up, the company would deduct their weekly car payments directly from their Uber earnings.5 In New York, Uber for years referred drivers to dealers who offered similar subprime loans (the company has since shut down Xchange Leasing and ended its subprime car leasing program in New York).6 As it recruited new drivers, the startup could sound a lot like a persistent pitchman for these financing options. A potential driver who had submitted his phone number to Uber could, for instance, expect a string of text messages like this real example from New York City:
Monday 8:28 AM
Get started this week! Your next step is to make an appointment to visit the Uber office. Earn $6,000 in your first month—GUARANTEED.
Monday 12:09 PM
Still need a wheelchair accessible vehicle (WAV) class before renewing your license? Schedule a FREE morning, afternoon, or evening class.
Tuesday 9:51 AM
New/Used vehicles for rent & lease-to-own from Fast Track Leasing! NEW SPECIAL OFFERS.
Wednesday 8:02 AM
Your next step is to make an appointment to visit the Uber office. Get started today & earn $6,000 in your first month—GUARANTEED.
Thursday 9:25 AM
Ready to start driving? Come visit us at our new location to get started!
Friday 8:02 AM
There is no better time to start driving! Make $6k in your first month—GUARANTEED.
Friday 11:23 AM
Get started this weekend! Book a rental with Buggy TLC Rentals this weekend & get $50 off your 1st week from Buggy.
Uber pitched aggressively, set lofty expectations, and encouraged drivers to invest money in renting or leasing a car up to its standards. It made promises that were sometimes hard to believe. But as Abe drove around Kansas City with his coworker, and the app continued to ping with real ride requests from real people, he started to believe that it really was a great opportunity.
“I started seeing pings left and right,” Abe remembers. “I started saying, wow, there are a lot of people who use the service. Maybe there is some money to be made.” Later that week, Abe signed up.
People have long dreamed of escaping the rigidity and conformity of their jobs. But the pitch that Uber used to recruit drivers—independence, flexibility, and freedom—seemed especially well suited to the preferences of a new demographic that had become the object of fascination, even obsession, for virtually every marketer, trend spotter, and sociologist concerned with generational shifts: the millennial.
Survey-taking millennials have ranked personal development and flexibility above cash bonuses; stated higher expectations for working their own hours; and have rated work-life balance as more essential than any other job quality, including positive work environment, job security, and interesting work.
These types of findings (often best read in the voice David Attenborough uses to narrate wildlife documentaries) have led to widespread accusations that millennials (“a fascinating species”) are conspiring to upend the workplace: “The 9 to 5 job may soon be a relic of the past, if Millennials have their way,” begins one column from Forbes.7 Another, from the New York Times, asks, “Are millennials—those born from roughly 1980 to 2000—about to fundamentally change companies for the better? Yes, if companies dare to listen.”8 The Washington Post framed the same idea a bit more cynically: “This pampered, over-praised, relentlessly self-confident generation … is flooding the workplace,” its columnist wrote. “They’ll make up 75 percent of the American workforce by 2025—and they’re trying to change everything.”9
But the survey results that suggested millennials thought about work in a drastically different way than their parents weren’t exactly a mystery. Let’s pretend you’re a millennial (unless you are, like the largest segment of the American workforce, actually a millennial, in which case you can just be yourself).10 Now, do you like flexibility and freedom at work?
You do! It’s not exactly a shocking result. But compared to previous generations of young people who might have also desired more independence, you, a millennial with professional skills, can more easily discard your full-time, traditional job—thanks to the internet.
There’s a classic economic explanation for this:11 People decide to join law firms, medical practices, and other companies, rather than sell their skills directly, when the cost of doing business—making sales, handling finances, communicating with customers—is higher than the bump in pay they might receive by striking out on their own. With the internet, many of these costs have become lower or even disappeared. Few people need a receptionist if they have voicemail and an email inbox (and those who do can hire a virtual personal assistant for around $5 an hour). Software programs handle bookkeeping, and for many professionals, working online negates the need to rent an office.
Earning an income without a traditional job simply doesn’t require as big an investment as it once did. And as gig economy platforms began to focus on all sorts of white-collar professions, they helped clear one of the last big obstacles to working independently: a way to find work. The idea of independent work is appealing whether you are young or old, and though the gig economy is often portrayed as an invention of the young, both demographics joined. Between 46% and 60% of young people in Europe and the United States do some type of independent work, but they make up only about a quarter of the independent workforce.12
Curtis Larson, a 24-year-old programmer living in New York City, is one of them.
Before Curtis joined the gig economy, he walked each morning from his apartment to a traditional desk job. It was a good job, located in a high-rise skyscraper, that he’d been happy to line up before graduating from college in 2013, two years prior. But he couldn’t stand it.
On a typical day, he finished his work within two or three hours. And then he spent the rest of the day desperately searching for something else—anything else—to do. His company wanted him present in the office but didn’t provide enough work to fill the time.
At first, he proposed additional work projects. But it would take days for teams and supervisors to sign off on them, and even then, they’d usually be rejected. So he resorted to spending most of the hours between lunch and five o’clock reading every article on the tech forum Hacker News and watching Twitch, a website that broadcasts live feeds of other people playing video games. Less than two years into his professional career, Curtis was bored out of his mind and wasting a large part of his waking time.
One freezing January night, on his walk home, he decided he’d had enough of corporate employment. That night, he set his alarm for 6:45 a.m., three hours before his workday started. When it buzzed the next morning, he carried his laptop computer to a nearby Starbucks, where he began working on a website he called “Crontent.” The site would aggregate social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, and other networks into a single daily digest, so that a user could see all of the important news their friends had posted in one place. Its name was a play on the words “content” and “cron,” the technical term for a programmed task that automatically repeats every day.
It was a terrible name. Most people who weren’t programmers wouldn’t get the joke. But that wasn’t a problem, because Curtis didn’t really plan for Crontent to have users. He hated selling, marketing, and advertising, which was part of what had made coding attractive in the first place. By building Crontent, he hoped to demonstrate to startups that he had serious skills.
After his morning Starbucks stop, he went to his day job. There, after finishing his work for the day, he scanned Tech-Crunch and Hacker News for startups that might have use for his abilities. This became his daily routine.
Weeks later, during this daily scan, a different kind of startup caught his eye. “Help build the world’s engineering department,” it advertised on its website.
He looked more closely. It seemed the site, called Gigster, wasn’t looking for employees to help build the world’s biggest engineering department. Instead, it wanted independent contractors, or “remote talent,” who could work on their own schedules. “The nature of work is changing,” the promo text read. “In the future, companies will leverage remote talent.”13
While almost anyone could drive a car for Uber, Gigster had applied the gig economy strategy to software development, an area of expertise notoriously scarce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020, there will be 1.4 million computer science jobs, but only 400,000 computer science graduates to fill them.14 Which is why mere interns at companies like Facebook and Google make a higher wage than the average American worker.15
Gigster was successful partly because it was so expensive for companies to hire developers as full-time employees. It provided companies with a staff that they could pay per project, without worrying about building out elaborate perks like free meals and on-site dry cleaning that had become standard on tech company campuses.
Curtis had worked as “remote talent” once before, though he thought of the work as “freelance,” which sounded less grand. During the summer before he left for university, he’d designed websites in his hometown on the eastern shore of Maryland. But that had been a way to make tuition money—he had never considered freelancing to be a career. He’d always imagined that he’d get a full-time job after college. Still, he was just bored enough to give Gigster a shot.
The only hurdle that might have stopped him was a long interview, the very thought of which made Curtis cringe. In college he had spent his free time on coding projects, like building scripts to formulate minute-song-snippet playlists for “power hours,” a drinking game in which participants drink a shot of beer every minute for an hour. But he had a hard time focusing on subjects for which he could find no real-world applications, which included most of his classes and many of the questions tech companies asked during interviews.