So today, the California Labor Commission has decided that an Uber driver was, in fact, an Uber employee. This is one of those things that doesn’t past the “are you dumb as a box of hammered snot” test: are you provided equipment by the company? Does the company set the rates for your service (and prohibit your receiving tips)? Does it rate your performance and disallow your working if you drop below a certain threshold? Congrats! You are an employer.
I’ve been chirping for years that this sort of thing was inevitable – that given the opportunity, companies would eventually outsource anything below a director level and collect individual contributors and their leads/managers in a way that would make them completely disposable – the only thing is, I assumed it would be through the sort of staffing agencies that provided us with contractors during the boom of the late 90s in DC. Instead, we have “the 1099 economy,” which is the middle-class-white-people-smartphone-enabled version of day labor. Minimum viable product? The modern way of life in Silly Con Valley appears to be “least possible amount of work you can do and still be a company.” That’s the trick Uber is trying to pull off: being a taxi company that outsources the business of owning cars or hiring drivers and just collects the vig for matching people up. What they argue is that they’re not Yellow Cab, they’re Tinder.
But it’s everywhere. I get the same thing at work when the telecoms people won’t troubleshoot a phone issue – the VoIP phone is plugged into a local network jack, so go look at that and confirm it works before you call us, and oh by the way we don’t support the headsets we gave out with the phones because they’re peripherals, and if you can’t fix them you should call the company we hired to go hand out the phones and headsets in the first place, but not us. That’s the miracle of technology combined with outsourcing: you can run a business and collect money while simultaneously chanting “NOT IT” the minute someone has a problem.
Good gig, if you can get it. But a future where you can either be the big entity cashing the checks or the 1099’er stringing together gigs to build an income sounds more like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia than a future vision of the good life. I used to say that Silicon Valley is where the future comes from – and if that’s still true, you might not be glad that it does.