Hustle and Gig

Alexandrea Ravenelle interviewed about eighty workers on Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Kitchensurfing in New York City, and reports what they said about pay, risk and recourse. She sorts them into three groups: Success Stories, who use the platforms as intended and do well; Strivers, who have other income and treat gig work as a supplement; and Strugglers, who depend on it and cannot make it produce a living.

Her central claim is that platform work reverses a century of labour protection. Workers classified as independent contractors have no minimum wage, no workers' compensation, no unemployment insurance and no protection from discrimination or harassment. Ravenelle documents specific consequences: drivers assaulted by passengers with no employer to report to, cleaners injured in strangers' homes, hosts whose apartments were damaged, workers deactivated by algorithm with no appeal. She argues that the sharing-economy vocabulary of entrepreneurship and flexibility conceals a transfer of risk that the New Deal settlement had assigned to employers.

The sample is small, self-selected and confined to one city at one moment, and Ravenelle does not attempt to measure how representative her respondents are. She also gives limited weight to workers who value the flexibility genuinely, though the Success Stories chapter acknowledges them. The book predates the California legislation and the European reclassification rulings that followed, so the regulatory discussion is dated. Its strength is the specific documentation of what happens when something goes wrong and no employment relationship exists.