My boss is an app

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Yeah, I've totally seen these folks making deliveries in my neighborhood in LA, just driving up in their own car and leaving an Amazon package. That's right. And here's the story. This one day before the pandemic, Julia was out delivering packages. It was wintertime and there's snow on the ground. It's icy. And Julia is out there driving her 14 year old minivan and she slides into the stitch in a snow bank and she's completely stuck. It was scary and it's cold and it's like am I going to get out of here, you know? And so she calls Amazon, the company she's delivering packages for, and they send someone out to her and he takes the packages and he leaves. So Amazon, they just came and picked up their packages and somebody else delivered them. And somebody else delivered them. So he took the packages and left her in the snow. That's right. She was stuck in that snow bank for hours. She had to call her sister and her brother-in-law and her cousin to come get her out. And they helped drag her car out the snow. I can laugh about it now, but I was like a mess. I was like, oh, please, my car. And the reason this story has stuck with me is that if Julia was considered an employee instead of an independent contractor, chances are things would have gone very differently. If she'd been in a company truck, the company would have gotten it out of the snow. But driving for Amazon Flex, she's on her own. And this image of Julia stranded in the snow kind of strikes me as a metaphor for one of the things we've been talking about all this season. How sometimes the growth of the non-employee economy can kind of leave people stranded in the snow. You're on your own, but not always in a good way. Welcome to The Uncertain Hour. I'm Chrissy Clark. And today we're going to do something a little different, a sort of postscript to our series on this thing we used to call employment. We're going to tie up some loose ends, hear some of your stories, and talk about something that until now we haven't directly addressed. A lot of times when I tell someone about our season, how it's all about these ways that companies have begun shedding employees and the responsibilities that come with them, they say, oh, so it's about Silicon Valley and the whole gig app economy, Uber and Lyft and Instacart and Amazon Flex and all of that. And usually I'm like, no, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The battles over what employment really means have been going on for much longer than those apps and websites, and they affect so many people who are not gig workers for those platforms. But they are a force in our economy today, especially since the pandemic. And so as we wrap up the series, we want to look at two of the big ways that these tech-based gig companies often sell themselves to workers. One, the idea that this kind of work is really flexible and independent, and two, on the idea that it's just a fun way to make a little extra cash when you need it. Today we're going to look at how it's a little more complicated than that. And we're going to start by having my colleague, Stephanie, take us along on a day she spent with Julia, the woman who was left in that snowbank when she was doing work for Amazon Flex, to get a sort of driver's eye view about all this. And Stephanie, you told me about how when people like Julia sign up to work for Amazon Flex, they get a lot of messaging from the company about just how independent and flexible the work's going to be. That's right. On the Amazon Flex website, Amazon makes a big deal out of the fact that you can be your own boss. They say things like, quote, you're in the driver's seat, and they play up how much freedom you can have driving your own car, listening to music, working whenever you want to. But Stephanie, you've spent time with Julia while she was driving around doing her job, and you say it's not that simple. Yeah, I've been talking to Julia for over a year now, before the pandemic and during it too. I sent her a recorder for her to use while we were talking, and she got really into it. Coming live from Amazon. And Julia's job is flexible in some ways. It's called Amazon Flex, after all. Yeah, and that's part of the reason she's been driving for Amazon Flex for a while, five years. Julia's the primary source of income for her household. Her kids live with her. They're 18 and 20, and both in remote school right now. Her boyfriend does too. He's on dialysis for kidney failure. So she's busy, and she likes it, and Flex lets her work when she has time to work, and that she can drop a shift less than an hour before she's scheduled if something comes up. So there's things she likes about this arrangement. Yes, but there are all these ways that her work for Amazon Flex is not that flexible. And a lot of it comes back to the Amazon Flex app. That's really where her whole job is managed. It's how she signs up for shifts, finds out where she's delivering packages, and all those things are run by algorithms, which really aren't that smart. And what I saw when I hung out with Julia was the app rules all for these drivers. I went out with Julia for a full day before the pandemic, and we drove around in her minivan. It's an old Toyota Sienna. And I was struck by how many parts of her job are really inefficient, despite the promises that we often hear about how technology is supposed to get tasks done quickly and efficiently. So like, what did you see? Starting at the very beginning, just getting a shift. Whenever Julia had a spare moment, I saw her looking at her phone. Okay, so Julia, describe what you're doing. Just kind of tap him to see if any of the groceries drop. Tapping to see if the groceries drop? Yeah, she's tapping the app. Amazon uses its Flex app to offer shifts to workers. Julia calls the moment when those shifts appear on her app the drop. But it doesn't happen in any kind of predictable way, so Julia has to tap her phone repeatedly, refreshing the Amazon Flex app to see if she's being offered work. And it'll show when it drops, and then I'll be able to kind of try to catch what I can before the other drivers do. There's a lot of competition for hours because drivers say Amazon pays relatively well for app-based gig work, and that means Julia spent hours and hours tapping her phone for shifts. I'm not going to lie, I had plenty of times that I was in bed like this, and then somehow, someway, I was awoken by the phone falling on my forehead. Because she was falling asleep, like she'd been tapping for so long that she was falling asleep as she was doing it. That's right. And now Julia's trying another way to get shifts, where the app will ping workers depending on where they are, offering them work that starts immediately. And that's led Julia to create this whole other system, where she'll try to figure out the places that she's most likely to get offered a shift. Near an Amazon warehouse, but not too near one, and she will drive there and sit in her car waiting for the app to send her work. It sounds like she's shaping her whole day to get this work. Sometimes she is. It's like this elaborate game where if you win, you get to work. And it seems kind of addictive watching Julia. It reminded me a lot of like a slot machine. And just to be clear, she's not getting paid for any of this time that she's tapping on the phone or driving and sitting waiting outside a building she hopes might get her a job. It's totally uncompensated. And this is where we can dig into the numbers a little bit. On its website, Amazon says most flex drivers make between $18 to $25 an hour. But there's an asterisk next to those numbers that says actual earnings will depend on your location, tips, and how long it takes you to deliver, and other factors. We have seen asterisks like that before in our season. Asterisks. Gotta watch out for them. And there's all this stuff that Amazon doesn't take into account when it advertises that hourly rate. It doesn't include the time drivers spend tapping for shifts. And I've heard about drivers who spend eight hours tapping to get a two hour shift. Wow. And once you get a shift, Amazon estimates the length of time the deliveries will take. And Julia tells me if it takes longer than that, she has to put in a request for more money, which she doesn't always bother to do. So how much was Julia actually making when you take into account all those asterisks? Julia had never done the math, but we went over it and she says if you factor in all the hours tapping, as well as the uncompensated time between shifts, plus tolls and gas. Every time I get paid, I actually take $100 out and put it to the side for gas. And the money she has to spend on her car to do things like replace her tires. And that's all stuff that you have to replace yourself. I put in thousands of dollars into this car, thousands. She thinks she's probably making minimum wage, which in Pennsylvania is still the same as the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. And we should say in some states, flex drivers have actually sued Amazon, saying they have been misclassified as independent contractors and they really should be considered employees and earn at least a minimum wage. How would that be a guarantee? But it sounds like the system you're talking about is set up so it's kind of easy not to do any of that math to even know how much you are making. That's right. Even when you sign up for shifts, Amazon will have a range. For example, it will list a shift as making between $15 to $30 an hour. And Amazon's assuming that when drivers deliver groceries, the customers may give them tips. But Julia told me when customers tip through the app, Amazon doesn't let them know who tipped and who didn't. And actually the Federal Trade Commission investigated Amazon for taking the tips drivers earned and using them to subsidize the rate it was paying drivers. Which tips are supposed to be an additional amount of money on top of what you're making? That's right. And Amazon didn't admit any wrongdoing, but it did pay more than $61 million to the FTC over this. And the FTC is taking the money Amazon paid it and distributing it back to drivers. Has Julia gotten any money from that settlement? No, not yet, but I know she's hoping to. And so back to this day that you spent with her. So she spends hours tapping to get her shifts for the day and then what happens? So this day she'd managed to get four shifts. We headed over to the Amazon warehouse and I noticed she had this pile of hats and gloves on the floor behind her seat. And then while we were waiting in traffic, I saw her roll down her window and give a hat to a man who was standing in the middle of the street. So she just keeps hats in the car for people who need them. That's right. And if she sees someone who needs a hat or a pair of gloves, she pulls over while she's out delivering. And on this day, each of her shifts was about two hours long. And she told me Amazon won't let them line up the shifts right next to each other. The company requires at least a half hour between each shift. And during that time, Julia doesn't get paid. So in order to work an eight hour day, it was going to take at least nine and a half hours of Julia's time. And this day it was going to take even longer. Between the second and third shift, the unpaid wait time was 90 minutes. So that's an hour and a half. Yeah, that's a long time. Sometimes like an hour, two hours between. So that's what kind of makes it like tiring. And so we were sitting in the parking lot outside one of Amazon's food warehouses waiting for her next shift to start. And while we were waiting, we saw workers come out with piles of groceries moving towards the dumpsters. She gave me throwing out good stuff. She always throwing out good stuff. And they were throwing away food, all these bags of food. So they're throwing out like D'Jorno pizzas. Those are stuff that was returned by other drivers. Like if they couldn't deliver it and they bring it back, they throw it out. They should let the driver have it. They won't let the driver have it. Remember, the drivers don't have company vehicles. They use their own cars. And it's not like Julia's car has a special refrigeration unit. And it's possible the groceries, including meat and frozen food, have been in the car a couple hours. And if they can't deliver food, Amazon tells the drivers to bring it back to the warehouse. Like it said, that all this is going to be trashed. Wow, that's wild. And it also makes me think about how even though Amazon says Julia's an independent contractor, she's not empowered to make decisions about what to do with the food that she can't deliver. Amazon's just making her bring it back. That's right. Julia said that one of the Amazon warehouse managers told her that if any drivers took groceries out of the trash, they'd be deactivated. What does deactivated mean? Yeah, it's the word Amazon uses instead of being fired. Remember, Amazon considers these drivers to be independent contractors, not employees, so they can't technically be fired. But Amazon can stop working with them at any time by deactivating their accounts. It sounds so machine like. I know. It's not just Amazon's term. Uber uses it as well as DoorDash, a lot of the gig companies. For Amazon, Julia says there are certain things that can count against drivers and hurt their ratings, which can lead to deactivation. For example, if they drop a shift less than 45 minutes before it starts, she says it also counts against them if they bring back a bunch of packages or groceries that they can't deliver. So what happens with Julia next? So Julia got a buzz from the Amazon Flex app to tell her where she's delivering. Her first delivery of this shift is in Center City, Philadelphia, and the next is in New Jersey, which is right next to the city, but can still take a while to get to during rush hour traffic. But Amazon's app is predicting she'll be able to get it all done before her next shift. We load the groceries into the minivan. There's dozens of bags. And then we set off. We drop off the first delivery downtown. Hi. Thank you very much. Is everything having a good life? It's late afternoon and there's a lot of traffic. This is going nowhere. We haven't moved. This was heavy. There's people getting out their cars. It's starting to rain, and at this point Julia's getting worried. She's on a schedule because she has another shift right after this one, and she has to get to New Jersey and back before it starts. Then the Amazon GPS sends us the wrong way. It says no turns up there, so I have to go this way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, come on. When we finally get there... This is the humongous apartment building. Jesus. Julia parks and then borrows a hand truck from the doorman to get the bags upstairs. There's about 12 and all. Just that one? Yeah. She takes the groceries up to the apartment. And the whole time she's constantly doing math in her head. She still has a few deliveries left to go, but she has to be back in Philadelphia at the Amazon distribution station before her next shift starts. So it looks like I'm 31 minutes away from the station, and I'm 5 minutes away from my next stop. Remember, Amazon lets its drivers drop their shifts up to 45 minutes before they start. Do you ever get frustrated when you can't deliver everything? Yes. It kind of makes me want to drop this next shift and just deliver it, but I'm like, I need the money, you know? But by the time Julia finishes this delivery, she's missed the deadline, and she's still got dozens of bags of groceries in her car. I've never returned as many packages in my life. Julia wants to see if she can stay in New Jersey, finish these deliveries, and then go back to Philadelphia for her next shift. But since she's considered an independent contractor, she doesn't have a boss back at the warehouse that she can call. Instead, Amazon gives drivers a 1-800 number that they can call for any problems. Thank you for contacting Amazon Driver Support. After Julia clicks through the options, a real person gets on the line. Thank you for calling Amazon. Julia explains the situation to the woman on the phone, who says, yeah, she's got to be on time for her next shift. And so she needs to bring back all the groceries. She said to scan all the packages back in so that way they can assign it to another driver. They're not going to do that because once it leaves the station, they won't. They won't send it back out with another driver. So just to be clear, we're in New Jersey with food that has to be delivered in New Jersey. But instead of delivering those groceries, we have to take them back to Philadelphia. So everything is pretty much going to go in the trash. We have no way of knowing what happened to those groceries, but they probably did go into the trash, just like the groceries we saw getting dumped earlier. You could probably see it on my face. I feel like a messed up person. I feel sad. There's so many hungry people out here. I want to finish this, but I don't want to be penalized. Either way, I look at it, I'm going to be penalized. Drivers are measured based on how many successful deliveries they have. So Julia's rating could be hurt by returning this many groceries, even though the driver's support representative told her to. And if a rating goes down, remember, it means you're more likely to be deactivated. But she's totally stuck between this rock and this hard place. And it does seem like this is a moment where if Julia truly is an independent contractor who runs her own business, these are exactly the kinds of decisions that she should be making. Like, does it make sense to just keep delivering, even though it's going to make me a little bit late? Or should I turn around right now? But you're saying she can't make those decisions. That's right. That's right. She's not empowered to. And Julia said this was an unusual day. She doesn't usually have to return this many groceries. But it still shows that even though the promise of big technology is to make our lives better, these automated systems aren't that smart. And when you put an app in charge of an army of non-employees, it can be really inefficient and wasteful of groceries for sure, but also the time and mental health of the workers. What happened to Julia? Was she deactivated? She wasn't. I think Julia's helped by the fact that she's a really good worker. She's still working for Amazon, but she dreams of running her own business someday, where she's truly independent. Amazon is a good company, you know, but there's no room for advancement, really. You know, as a driver, I'm always just going to be a driver. It's good for a second job. I always say that it's good for a second job, not for a first job. Of course, in Julia's case, Amazon Flex is her main job. And her second job is also a gig job. So is her third job. In addition to Amazon, Julia tries to make ends meet by driving for Uber, DoorDash. She shops for Instacart occasionally. And she does all of this work for companies where she's not an employee. And, Stephanie, what did Amazon say in response to all this? So I asked Amazon for an interview and also sent the company more than a dozen detailed questions about the Flex program, including whether it's their policy to throw out undelivered groceries and what sort of support they provide to drivers who have an accident or get stuck in the snow. Most of the questions Amazon didn't answer directly, but the company did say it offers auto insurance to drivers while they're delivering packages at no cost to them. The company also emphasized that drivers can work when they want to and how the work is, you know, really flexible. Thanks so much, Stephanie. Thanks, Chrissy. After the break, we dig deeper into that idea of flexibility with gig app work and who it's really flexible for. One of the things that lots of gig companies have in common is that they advertise this idea of flexibility for workers. It's true of old school, low tech, janitorial gig companies like Janpro, and it's of course true for high tech app based gig companies like the ones Julia works for in Philadelphia. Flexibility is written right into the name of Amazon Flex. The CEO of Uber talks about the beauty of picking up work when you want to, stopping when you want to. And these companies sometimes argue that the work can only be flexible if they're allowed to treat their workers as independent contractors, not employees. Of course, there's no law saying employment can't be flexible, but that word, flexibility, can be slippery. I wanted to unpack this word and some of the other promises of the app based gig economy, which led me to Vina Dubal. She's a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law. She spent years researching gig economy platforms and she's interviewed and surveyed hundreds of Uber and Lyft drivers. And in that time, she's become critical of these companies' treatment of their drivers. Part of why comes down to that word, flexibility. She says flexibility is a reason many drivers she's talked to get into the work. No one wants a boss. No one wants to be told where they have to be, when they have to be there. And at the very beginning, sort of when you start working, you're like, great, I don't have a boss and no one is telling me anything. And then you realize over time, oh, actually, I do have a boss. It's the app. And I actually have to work in a very regimented way during very specific times in order to make any money. And if they had just told me at the very beginning and just like given me that shift, it actually might have been a little easier. But Vina says there is one group of people, gig app work really does seem to be flexible for the companies. It's very flexible for Uber and Lyft and Instacart. The entire model is built upon this idea that they do not have to calibrate supply and demand. It is not their job. They are hands off. What they rely on is an oversupply of drivers. You know, it would be like McDonald's at any given moment having 50 people in the kitchen, no matter what demand was like. But they don't have to pay them until they need them. But they don't have to pay them until they need them, exactly. And the fact that the companies don't have to worry about calibrating supply and demand gives them a great deal of flexibility. They don't have the overhead associated with labor costs. They don't have all of the expenses associated with third party liabilities during that downtime. You know, all they have to worry about is ultimately do they have drivers and is there some demand? And that's a very different sort of business calculation than most businesses have to deal with. That might lower labor costs and liabilities for app-based companies, but it also makes work a lot less predictable for workers and makes their paychecks a lot less predictable too. I told Vina that one of the things that surprised me most when I heard from Julia, the Amazon Flex driver in Philly, is that she didn't actually have a good sense of how much she earns from her job. Vina told me, oh yeah, that's totally true for Uber and Lyft drivers too. It's a really common problem to not actually have a good sense of how much money they're making. At the end of the day, when they look at their earnings, it just represents what the company is giving to them, not minus their expenses. And expenses are such a huge portion of this economy. So one driver told me his gross income looked to be about $45,000 for the year for driving for Uber. But then when he subtracted all of his vehicle expenses, the Uber service fee, the booking fee, the airport fee, etc., it turned out that he was netting $21,000. Wow, so like less than half. Yes, huge difference. But so many people who get into this work, they don't have a real sense for what their take home pay is. And I've called this kind of the rationality of poverty. You know, when you just need to have X number of dollars in your bank account to make rent or to put food on the table to pay your debt, you don't have the sort of the luxury of thinking about subtracting your expenses from your wages because you just need those wages in your pocket that day. Maybe your stereotype of a gig-app worker is someone who's just doing it as a side hustle to make some extra money. And that's true for many drivers. Some make pretty good money, too. But here are some numbers that surprised me. According to one recent study of ride-hale and delivery app drivers in San Francisco, the majority of the work is being done by people who drive full-time for platform companies and who depend on the work as their primary source of income. Almost half of them couldn't handle a $400 emergency expense, and 15% of the workforce relies on some form of public assistance. In another study of Uber and Lyft drivers in Seattle, it's estimated that as many as 34% of full-time drivers might earn below the local minimum wage. Venus says part of why the pay can be so low has to do with those fees and car expenses, she mentioned. There's also just a lot of time that goes uncompensated, like any time a driver has the app on but hasn't gotten a signed ride yet. According to industry numbers, that waiting time amounts to about a third of the time people have the app on. Drivers Venus talked to say it can be even more. The companies argue why should they pay for this wait time? Who knows what the drivers might be doing. They could be driving through another platform or doing personal errands with the app open. But Venus says, based on her research, the reality is that none of that time is spent sort of doing something for the driver themselves. They're driving around and driving itself can be very, very stressful, trying to figure out a location where they might pick up work. This is time that they are sort of frantically hoping, waiting, almost like someone who is waiting to win the lottery, sort of hoping that they will get a hit or a fare. And having some sense that this fare is going to determine whether or not you're really going to be able to make money that day, whether you're going to be able to put food on the table, pay for rent. It's a really anxiety filled time. Venus says that all this anxiety along with other frustrations around the job, like how little they sometimes make, has led many of the drivers she's followed over the years to leave the work and gig work altogether. And those drivers, interestingly, many of them are now doing wage work, making the minimum wage. They say that they don't enjoy the work as much as they like driving, but that they at least have some predictability of income. What kinds of jobs? So one driver that I'm thinking of actually is doing food delivery, but as an employee of a company, of a pizza company. Another former driver I know of got a job at Costco, and he says it's just like a huge relief to not feel that constant anxiety all day long. And he said, looking back, I realized I was addicted to the work, like I was addicted to waiting to get a fare. I was addicted to like driving around, seeing how long it would take me to meet my earning statement. Like he said, it felt like a gamble almost. And he actually reflected back and said that it's such a huge relief to not be doing this anymore. Venus says she's spoken to a number of drivers in California who have recently stopped doing work for Uber and Lyft for a very particular reason. Proposition 22. A little backstory here. Prop 22 is a state ballot initiative that California voters passed in November. Uber, Lyft, and other app-based gig companies sponsored the measure and spent more than $200 million campaigning for it. It's the most expensive ballot initiative in U.S. history. And it came immediately after California had passed a law that was going to make it harder for these companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors. We talked about that law a bunch earlier this season. It's the one that adopted that ABC test. It was a test that would determine if a worker was really an employee. And under the test, it was pretty likely most app-based gig drivers would be considered employees, with all the rights and protections that come with employment. But a lot of the companies those drivers work for said that would make their business models untenable. They argued there'd be fewer jobs and less flexibility if they had to treat their drivers as employees. So they wrote and sponsored their own law, which became Proposition 22. Prop 22 said drivers for app-based gig companies are specifically exempted from standard state employment laws and benefits like minimum wage and overtime pay, unemployment insurance, and workers' comp. Sort of in the way that minor league ball players got carved out of federal wage laws. Except instead of going to lawmakers, these gig app companies went straight to voters. But in the campaigning for Prop 22, companies did not focus on the fact that the law would carve their drivers out of the standard protections guaranteed to employees in California. What they focused on was this other thing, how the law would give drivers a few narrower benefits. And during some of their work, they'd be guaranteed at least 120% of the local minimum wage. They'll get guaranteed earnings and they can maintain their flexible schedules. But there was a catch. Drivers would only get those guaranteed earnings for the time when they were actually driving someone somewhere or delivering something to someone. All the other time they spent waiting for work or driving back from a ride or a delivery, time that would probably be paid if they were employees. Under this law, the companies wouldn't have to pay workers anything for that time. So it didn't amount to a real minimum wage earning. Because it was just the engaged time quote-unquote that they were. Exactly. And yet, and yet, and I really want to emphasize this, the company representatives in California did a very good job of obscuring that that was the reality. They kept saying that they were providing 120% of the minimum wage earnings. And I've even heard more recently after Proposition 22 passed, I've heard company representatives say this as they try and spread the gospel that they are providing 120% of the minimum wage. And that is just not accurate. And, you know, no overtime protections, no unemployment insurance, very limited disability coverage as opposed to a lifetime of disability coverage. You get two years of disability coverage. Really just took all state employment rights away from these workers in the middle of a pandemic. Workers who, Vina points out, are predominantly people of color and immigrants. According to a recent Lyft report, more than 60% of their drivers in North America identify as black, Latinx or Asian. In a separate study commissioned by officials in San Francisco, at least 78% of the city's on-demand ride-hailing and delivery workforce are people of color and 56% are immigrants. And these workers are, again, primarily workers of color with very little political or economic power. And my concern, and I think the concern of many observers and analysts and the workers themselves, is that this is going to exacerbate and entrench poverty in a moment where we are already living under heightened racialized inequality. Why is it okay for a primarily immigrant people of color workforce in California to have a completely different set, a lowered set of protections than every other worker? Prop 22.1 with almost 59% of the vote. But drivers for Uber, Lyft and other companies have sued to block the law, saying it's unconstitutional. And the voters were misled about what the law actually does. Its official title was the Protect App-Based Drivers and Services Act. I reached out to Uber and Lyft for comment. They didn't respond. But Uber forwarded my request to Jeff Vetter, a vice president at Clyde Group, a Washington, D.C. based PR firm. He's also the spokesperson for the Protect App-Based Drivers and Services Coalition, funded by Lyft, Uber and DoorDash. In a written statement, he pointed to the quote, long history of systemic racism in traditional hiring practices, which he contrasted to the quote, accessibility of economic opportunity provided by app-based work. He said, Prop 22 found widespread support in neighborhoods with large black and Latino communities, and that it was a quote, win-win, that protected and improved work for hundreds of thousands of drivers. Though, I should say, the benefits under Prop 22 are objectively weaker than what's guaranteed to employees under state law. Meanwhile, this strategy of gig-app companies trying to rewrite state employment laws to carve out their workers from standard employment protections, it's growing. As I record this, Massachusetts and Connecticut are considering similar laws and their rumblings in other states. So this is really going to be a state-by-state battle that workers and their allies fight over the next, you know, five to ten years. Of course, as we know, app-based gig work isn't the only kind of gig work out there. And before we close out this season, I want to turn to you. We asked our listeners to share your own stories of life on the front lines of non-employment, and we've been overwhelmed with emails and messages. The topic has clearly hit a nerve. You shared your experiences with temp work, subcontracting and independent contracting, experiences both good and bad, that speak to how these things have changed work everywhere, like Chase, who worked as an on-call home inspector in the city of D.C. And the tagline that they developed was Uber for home inspections. Yup, Uber for home inspections. Basically, independent contractors making sure building codes were up to snuff using their own equipment. He says he worked alongside home inspectors who were actually employees of the city, who got benefits and the tools they needed to work. But for independent contractor inspectors like him, they were on their own. So we were required to get an iPad, but it was $330 for me. Heat gun, to be able to check the temperature in various areas of the apartment. We sometimes did bed bug searches. So anything that you needed to keep yourself from getting bed bugs, any type of coveralls, tape measure, screwdriver set, carbon monoxide detector. And all of that was not reimbursed. Which adds up. And then this listener, up in the sky, teaching at a flight school as an independent contractor. He says there was little that was actually independent about it. Like I'm at an ATP flight school office wearing an ATP flight school uniform, using ATP flight school resources to train in ATP planes. And we provide the training using the ATP course outline, like down to the smallest minute detail. You must have hair that's above your ears. No tattoos showing. You have to be clean shaven all the time. No benefits. No overtime. No guarantees of anything. One listener who was working at an online news outlet says she saw her workplace transform around her. Hi Chrissy. This is Anna from Philadelphia. I was hired as a comment moderator in 2011. All the moderators hired after me were brought on as independent contractors at $10 an hour with no benefits. Some of the people who wrote to us really like being an independent contractor, like this freelancer who works in live events. Because I can stay busy working for a number of larger companies. But he says you got to know what you're getting into. The running joke with freelancers is marry smart and make sure that you have a spouse that has insurance because that's the only way you're going to be covered. I know that balancing act well. In my family, I am the spouse with insurance. So we heard from people whose companies were relying more on independent contractors. And we also heard from listeners who watched companies they work for turn to other forms of non-employees. Temporgers. Hi, my name's Nicole. I'm in Minnesota. I used to work for a very prominent New York jeweler speaking with some coworkers. I came to find out they were hired by a temp agency. They're not paid any benefits. Their salaries were also docked a little bit and kind of a finder's fee for the temp agency. And then there were folks on the other side of that equation questioning their role. Like this listener also from Minnesota. He works for a company that's part of this complicated chain of labor contractors. I work for a large staffing agency that acts as an employer of record for other smaller staffing agencies. The local company that needs temporary employees outsources that recruitment to a local staffing agency. That local staffing agency recruits the workers but outsources the employment on paper of these workers to our company's employer ID number. This directly drives down wages for that worker at the bottom so that the other three companies involved can all benefit taking a cut of the pie. I can't help but feel that the company I work for is directly contributing to the erosion of a healthy labor force in this country and the growing wealth gap. My family's benefited from me working here but at what cost to our society as a whole. We also got a message that everybody here at the uncertain hour wanted to be sure we shared with you. Our listener Joel Knopf wrote a song for us that he says was inspired by the stories from this season on the uncertain hour. Shouldn't I get a W2? Don't I deserve a sick day? You know I work hard for you. Shouldn't I make a good wage a decent amount? So amazing Joel, thank you. Because this says I don't count. At the beginning of this season I talked about how reporting these stories has made me walk through the world with these goggles on that make me see all the places where this thing we used to call employment has changed. How so many jobs that used to be done by people who were actually employed by the places where they worked are now done by non-employees, independent contractors, franchisees, subcontractors or temps. And hearing from you all makes me only feel the tremors of this shift more deeply. It's everywhere. Janitors, chicken catchers, baseball players, tech manufacturing, paralegals, media and podcasting organizations, parts of the company where I'm an employee. So many of us are dealing with these issues. And the more people I talk to about it, the more it's changed the way I see this whole idea of employment. I used to think of it as having a job, making some money, having health benefits and hopefully some security. But now I think of employment as actually a promise that we collectively have made with each other about what workers, the people who power our nation's businesses and our whole economy, are owed by the businesses that rely on their labor. Right now, sometimes without us even noticing it, that agreement's being rewritten on page 1967 of a congressional bill in the fine print of a franchise contract at a meeting your boss calls you into after a long day of work catching chickens in a ballot initiative. That's kind of hard to understand, but has a hopeful sounding name. Sometimes we experience these changes in isolation or a worried conversation in the middle of the night with a loved one. Part of the way our work is changing is that workers are becoming more isolated, more atomized, more fissured. I think about one listener, Lawrence Curtin, who wrote in about a delivery company he used to work for in New Jersey that called him an independent contractor. But really, he felt like he should be an employee. He mentioned the company was called Dynamics. We called Dynamics. We asked him, wait a minute, did you know that across the country, workers in California sued that same company over that exact same issue and one, that the Dynamics case transformed labor law in California? He had no idea. That's fantastic. I was completely unaware of it. I think about what this other listener, Curtis, wrote in about our season, hearing these stories about so many non-employees. He said, I'm so glad this is getting attention and it wasn't just me dealing with it. Curtis, it's definitely not just you dealing with it. In the years around the Great Recession, the use of all kinds of non-employees, temps, independent contractors and staffing agency workers, soared. More of those kinds of jobs were created than any other type of job. As we climb out of the pandemic and the world returns to some semblance of normal, what will the economy that comes back look like this time? What will employment look like? Who will get access to its benefits? Who won't? In the 1930s, the New Deal created federal laws establishing the right to unionize, to receive unemployment benefits, a minimum wage and overtime. What we think companies should owe their workers today? It's being shaped right now. We are shaping it right now. So, when history looks back on this moment, what will they see? That's it for this episode and this season of The Uncertain Hour. Thanks so much for listening. If you like what you've heard, please spread the word about the show. Send us a nice note. Tell us what you think we should cover next season. Our email is uncertainhouratmarketplace.org. Special thanks to Stephanie Hughes, a producer of Marketplace Tech for reporting part of this episode. And special thanks to David and Nicole Hughes, Peter Cole, George Gonos, Dave DeSario, Katie J. Wells, Sergio Gonzalez and Gabi Munoz, Allison Vermeulen, Anika Houston, Nancy Fargali, Daisy Palacios, Megan McCarty-Corino, and all our smart and generous colleagues at Marketplace who helped us with early feedback and shared their expertise. Our producers are Caitlyn Esch, Peter Balanon-Rosen and Chris Joolen. Our editor is Catherine Winter. Research and production help from Muna Danish, Daniel Martinez and Marquet Green. Our media producer is Robin Edgar. Our digital team is Tony Wagner, Erica Phillips and Donna Tam. Satara Nieves is the executive director of On Demand at Marketplace. And I'm Chrissy Clark. Bye for now.