So I picked up a book called Raw Deal<\/em>, by Steven Hill, subtitled How the Uber Economy\u201d and Runaway Capitalism are Screwing American Workers<\/em>, and started reading it the other day while waiting at the orthodontist\u2019s office during my son\u2019s appointment. \u00a0I read the first chapter and skimmed through the remainder, and the gist is simple: \u00a0American employers are \u201cscrewing American workers\u201d by hiring them on an independent contractor basis, with no protections and, often, subminimum pay, and, if present trends continue, soon enough every employer will discover that this is the path towards riches and no one will be a proper employee any longer, as factories and offices alike are transformed into gathering places of 1099 workers.<\/p>\n The usual villians all make their appearance here, some which I\u2019d heard of before (Uber, Airbnb) and some I hadn\u2019t. \u00a0Uber gets a whole chapter, with a litany of complaints that have all been voiced elsewhere: \u00a0Uber\u2019s competing unfairly with taxi drivers because the latter have to posess medallions, Uber is unfair to its users because of its surge pricing concept, Uber pays its drivers poorly. \u00a0Megan McArdle wrote in an article a couple weeks ago<\/a> that the bloom is off the rose, and Uber\u2019s drivers are starting to recognize that they need to take expenses and wear and tear into account in determining their net earnings, and, when doing so, that their earnings aren\u2019t so hot \u2014 and, as a consequence of doing so, many, she believes, will cease driving unless Uber raises its reimbursements. \u00a0Even skimming through this chapter in Hill\u2019s book, he describes drivers waiting for \u201csurge\u201d pricing to go into effect, which suggests a de facto negotiating power on the part of the drivers.<\/p>\n Airbnb? \u00a0Can\u2019t get too upset about that one. \u00a0We\u2019ve booked two places through there for our upcoming trip. \u00a0I\u2019ve flipped through his complaints about them, and they have nothing to do with workers; just the same litany of complaints that renters aren\u2019t screened and could be troublemakers disrupting the neighborhood, homeowners might\u00a0be crooks and rent in violation of their lease, condo association rules and regulations, or a locality\u2019s ordinances, don\u2019t pay the same taxes as a hotel would, etc.<\/p>\n On the other hand, there are some companies I\u2019d never heard of. \u00a0Fiverr.com<\/a>, for instance, offers the opportunity to purchase tasks from sellers at rates starting at $5. \u00a0It\u2019s tempting to see if I could find someone on the site who would, for a cheap rate, find royalty-free photos that fit with recent blog posts, but the reality is that most of the sellers are from outside the U.S. \u2014 such locations as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Croatia, Sri Lanka, from the selection of offers I looked at\u00a0\u2014 offering such services as website creating, WordPress migration, drawing\/illustrating, even creating and recording a jingle from text or homework help (or just plain doing the homework itself<\/a>); which means it\u2019s unlikely such a seller would understand enough about the content of my blog and about my largely American readership to be able to find effective images.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a fascinating concept, and you can get lost reading the services offered. \u00a0Is this an instance of the destructive gig economy? \u00a0It\u2019s hard to say that these are American employers taking advantage of hapless workers, when, from what I can tell, virtually all the sellers are not American at all, and are doing work that, depending on local cost of living, could be reasonably well-paying.<\/p>\n There are similar ventures, such as CrowdFlower<\/a>, in which, similar to Mechanical Turk<\/a>, workers perform tasks such as tagging images; according to Wikipedia its buyers are corporations, not small businesses, and it seems (unlike Mechanical Turk) to find its workers worldwide. \u00a0And Australia-based\u00a0Freelancer.com<\/a> adds the dimension that potential work providers post their job description, and prospective workers bid on the work.<\/p>\n So all of these offer low prices due to the global nature of the site, the work, and the economy. \u00a0The\u00a0\u201cgig economy\u201d service called Task Rabbit<\/a>, which I had never heard of before, is different, because the work is all in-person and local. \u00a0The book describes this as a system whereby desparate unemployed people bid to do menial services for others (cleaning, laundry, delivery of groceries or restaurant food orders), and where the desparation of the workers produces low bids, cheap services, and high profits for the company. \u00a0When taking into account the costs of driving from one job site to another, repeatedly over the course of the day, Hill claims that the \u201crabbits\u201d earn pitifully low wages, perhaps even less than the minimum wage.<\/p>\n Now, as it happens, the company changed their business model<\/a> in 2014. \u00a0Why Hill doesn\u2019t acknowledge that isn\u2019t clear \u2014 perhaps he wrote the book over a period of years and didn\u2019t check that his original research was still valid, or perhaps he chose to ignore this because the new approach doesn\u2019t make the case as strongly: \u00a0now, workers set rates and availability, and, when a potential user looks online, the system offers a couple alternatives from best matches; if the worker selected by the customer declines the job, an alternate user is offered it. \u00a0How this works isn\u2019t entirely clear to me, and one couldn\u2019t get very far on the site without registering and, it seemed, actually posting a task. \u00a0It also seems that, unlike the original \u201con-demand\u201d model, the company is moving towards emphasizing full-time \u201ctaskers\u201d who are always available.<\/p>\n How much do \u201ctaskers\u201d (company terminology)\/\u201drabbits\u201d (Hill\u2019s reported label among the workers themselves) actually earn? \u00a0A Time\/Money article<\/a> from a year ago profiled several workers with satisfactory earnings: \u00a0one charges $150\/hour, and does jobs such as carpentry and construction. \u00a0Another charges \u201c$25 an hour for events and $60 or $65 an hour for heavy lifting tasks and furniture assembly; $80 an hour for moving.\u201d \u00a0Another says, \u201cI tend to do a lot of furniture assembly and minor home repairs. For that I charge $35 to $45. When I\u2019m a personal assistant it\u2019s $26 and product testing is $25.\u201d<\/p>\n Is there a lot of variability? \u00a0Do taskers set their (fixed) pay rates low in order to get the job? \u00a0Surely the biggest issue is supply and demand and the local labor market, but TaskRabbit also promotes itself as having responsible, reliable (and middle-class) \u201ctaskers\u201d and I\u2019m not certain whether they accept the typical sort of immigrant worker who ends up mowing lawns or cleaning houses.<\/p>\n