Choice or Chance?

Driving is a form of intimate service work and reproductive labor that extracts the liveliness of drivers for the benefit of the passengers who become consumers of their labor. Even more importantly, this labor is ultimately accumulated as national and corporate wealth, under historical regimes of gender, race, class, nation, work and ableism. 

Spent Behind the Wheel: Drivers’ Labor in the Uber Economy is a book about taxi and gigged (which we shorthand as “Uber”) passenger driving. We focus on long-duration drivers, or those who spend more than eight hours behind the wheel in a day. We draw upon interviews with drivers and organizers as well as archival material to argue that long-duration driving across the gigged and taxi industries is structured to be, in the words of one of our informants, “a long slow slaughter.” Further, we trace how drivers have been subject to predatory practices not just at work but through ancillary structures such as loan schemes, “poor man’s law” (note 1), and criminalization. We understand this treatment to be akin to how other predominantly immigrant, low-wage service workers have been treated, and argue that their work conditions are a consequence of the ways law, labor, and public space have been historically structured in the U.S. We conclude that the celebration of techno-capital’s disruptions of traditional markets does not take into account the ways in which its generation of a widespread gig economy has continued to draw upon and maintain a precarious workforce.

Our understanding of drivers’ struggles draws heavily upon the work of a union, the Taxi Workers Alliance (TWA), which has its headquarters in New York. The TWA organizes to combat drivers’ exclusion from public resources, including the protections offered by labor law.  Through our work with them, we have explored how drivers are reflecting upon and challenging their work conditions, particularly the ways their interests are represented as antagonistic to their passengers. We discuss the rejection of these antagonisms by drivers and passengers, and how, instead of blaming each other, work instead to hold the taxi and app-hailed transportation companies accountable. 

Feminist theorists of reproductive labor have studied its racial and gender antagonisms, and have explained how these tensions accumulate as expectations of labor placed soley on the service worker. For example, Magally Alcazar reveals how domestic workers are expected to produce forms of unpaid affective work which are translated by their consumers as labors of love, rather than skilled work, all the better to maintain and justify the hierarchies and social awkwardness inherent to outsourced childcare and other forms of paid household work (Miranda Alzacar 233-256). As we note, the cab or gigged car is a hybrid space which serves as a space of leisure for the passenger and yet is also a workplace for the driver. The safety and comfort of the passenger is supposedly guaranteed by the surveillance devices mandated by transportation companies, but the health of both the passenger and driver is ultimately held to be the responsibility of the driver alone. By narrowing their own accountability to surveillance within the car, transportation companies mask the ways they expose drivers to larger forms of harm (such as poor wages, debility, and debt) and passengers to designed neglect and exclusion (such as the poor provision of accessible vehicles). The drivers’ affective labor works to hide these larger structural deficits; this labor of comportment and attendance ultimately burnishes the transportation companies’ brand, but does not accrue any benefit to the driver (for example, most Uber and Lyft drivers report not receiving any tips for their work). 

Rashne Limki names this dynamic – in which capital organizes antagonisms into tensions between individual drivers and riders, and then uses those antagonisms to sustain the accumulation of wealth – as a form of racial power and exercise of coloniality. Racial power structures the grounds and discourses through which lives gain relative value; and coloniality sorts them into populations dedicated to either serve or be served. Limki’s work on commercial surrogacy draws attention to the ontological priority of difference in creating this categorization. As she argues, “rather than being a social artifact that becomes replicated within the context of work, difference is, in fact, fundamental to the unfolding of any and all activity circumscribed as work. … the appearance of gender, sexual and racial difference is the condition of possibility for the institution and operation of work qua work” (Limki 327-342). As we write in Spent, Uber and Lyft have long marketed themselves as creating new work relations, or peer communities outside tired labor logics and hierarchies. However, Limki’s work shows how, even in gigged economies, capital depends on pervasive and persistent colonial logics to remain profitable.

Kalindi Vora also emphasizes the ways that digital economies, predicated on the diminishing of some lives to promote the thriving of others, participates in a decidedly colonial logic. While this logic of depletion and enrichment may bring up visions of European territorial colonialism, Vora argues that we can see “technoprecarity” as well. As she and her collaborators explain, technoprecarity “is the premature exposure to death and debility that working with or being subjected to digital technologies accelerates. It is the unevenly distributed yet pervasive condition” (Precarity Lab i). Given the ubiquity yet uneven effects of technoprecarity, her work prompts us to consider more deeply how the moments of interdependency between driver and passenger we point to in our book might give shape to a larger politics of shared liveliness. 

Certainly, alliances with prison abolition politics, or an abolitionist feminism more generally, can support shared liveliness. Such sharing could serve as a challenge to the carceral capitalism that is clearly at work in the surveillance technologies employed by companies like Uber.  The racist design and privatization of civic transportation also contributes to the conditions in which driver and passenger are stripped of other means of mobility but remain stuck with each other.  Rather than depend on carceral solutions (for example, the demands for more policing in the wake of the recent release of The Guardian’s “The Uber files”), abolitionist feminists, such as Mariame Kaba, specifically call for a return to communal organizing, or the commons. As Kaba writes, “[b]eing intentionally in relation to one another, a part of a collective, helps to not only imagine new worlds, but also to imagine ourselves differently.” 

It is encouraging to remember, in these precarious and scarce times, that Silvia Federici defines the commons as not just a site for redistributing available resources but also as a place to collectively build access to self-reproduction with tools (such as community gardens) not completely circumscribed by the logic of the market or the state. The means to cater to workers’ own reproduction, to recreate the social fabric, is to create forms of solidarity that we saw in the work of the TWA and in our conversations with drivers. Communities of resistance can be fortified by working towards a viable minimum wage, mutual aid organizations, health care for all, free public universities – and as we are honored to do so in the space of this blog – shared knowledges, common interests, and collective struggles.

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Notes

1. The Poor Laws in the United Kingdom (1834-1948) criminalized leisure among the working-class; since then, other governments have continued and extended legal practices that keep workers at work and even make accessing their rights economically disastrous. For example, a former judge overseeing infractions by NYC taxi drivers told us that most drivers do not challenge even scurrilous tickets because they cannot afford to take a day off work to come to court (which is inconveniently located below Wall Street).  

Bibliography

Federici, Silvia. Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, 2018.

Kaba, Mariame. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket, 2021.

Limki, Rashné. “On the Coloniality of Work: Commercial Surrogacy in India,” Gender, Work & Organization. 25:4. 

Miranda Alcazar, Magally A. “Women Workers Make All Other Work Possible: Latina Immigrant Organizing at the Oakland Domestic Workers’ Center.” Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power, Violence, #MeToo. New York, NY: Verso Books. 2018.

Precarity Lab, Technoprecarious, Goldsmiths Press, 2020. 

A version of this piece is due to be published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies (Vol 8 Issue 1).

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Learn more from co-authors Ray and Hua at a lunchtime lecture on Thursday, September 29. Details here.