Taken for a ride?

In what seems like another era before the pandemic hit us, I traveled on business. Back when the trips were few, my husband would dutifully drop me off and pick me back up from the airport. But as they grew more frequent and ride-sharing apps became the norm, I made the switch. The app based rides were far too convenient and cost-effective to resist. For the next few years, I was ferried back and forth by these gig-workers in my hometown and elsewhere, the rides appearing seemingly magically at the tap of the phone.

At some point, the apps introduced features to let the driver know that the passenger wanted to be left alone. The goal was to improve user experience by minimizing the annoyance of having to interact with another human being. Of course, the apps could not eliminate all signs of humanness of the drivers as evidenced by the occasional stroller or car seat pushed to the side of the trunk. One would need to wait for the fully autonomous rides of a not-so-distant future to take care of that. However, I was probably too old-fashioned and not as much a sociopath to leverage this feature, and conversed with them as most normally would. It may have been a coincidence, but it turned out that a vast majority of them were immigrants, from Africa to the Middle-east, and from Central and South Asia to Latin America. But no matter where they came from, they had similar aspirations and yearnings — a thread of commonality weaving their stories into one.

There was the single dad from Nepal who did night shifts at a factory and picked up rides during the day so he could rent a house in a ‘good school district’ for his son, a freshman in high-school. (The son cooked and did all the chores while acing his classes). There was the divorced mom from Afghanistan who tried giving her daughter the education and opportunities she herself did not have growing up, mildly disappointed that the daughter chose marriage over a promising career. There was the dutiful son who kept sending money back home to support his family and hoping his brother could join him some day, and the young man who was trying to pay for his programming classes, hoping to land a job in tech. They were common people striving to realize their common dreams, their lives intersecting with mine through ride-sharing apps, by tech startups whose valuations are greater than the GDP of some of the countries they had emigrated from.

If I did not have these interactions and were not privy to these stories, I probably would not have paid as much attention to California Proposition 22 that passed in the election by a 58% margin following the usual corporate funding and lobbying. To recapitulate, the proposition “classifies drivers for app-based transportation (rideshare) and delivery companies as independent contractors, not employees, unless the company sets drivers’ hours, requires acceptance of specific ride and delivery requests, or restricts working for other companies”. The implication? “These independent contractors are not covered by various state employment laws — including minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation”.

I am not qualified enough to parse the legal semantics of the proposition and debate one way or the other. But there is enough evidence to believe that the gig-economy has failed the workers whose backs it is built upon. The proposition further exposed the inherent inequities and lopsidedness of the system, especially at a time when these workers needed a safety net to help them through the pandemic. The fact that all these companies banded together to spend hundreds of millions of dollars makes the system feel rigged, not a surprising revelation but disappointing nevertheless, the joint lobbying by the companies accentuating the perennial line between corporations and the workers.

In retrospect, I feel I was rather naive to delete what was once the most popular ride-sharing app as a mark of protest, in a moment of internet activism (all that it did was prevent me from using the service in another country when I really needed to). I just hope that all those individuals that I had come across par chance through these rides are managing and doing OK in the face of the current adversity. Maybe another day post-pandemic, I will encounter some of them again and catch up on their lives. But a part of me also hopes and wishes that they find better opportunities and avenues to pursue their goals, even if that means I prepare for a silent ride in the driverless cars that are bound to take over anyway, sooner rather than later.