A Brief History of the Gig

Abstract

In 2020, almost a decade after the advent of Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing industry is facing a wave of militant self-organizing and claims to employment status by drivers. So far, the most significant mobilization has been the fight over AB5, a California assembly bill that was signed into law in September 2019, and which makes it much clearer that drivers should be treated as employees of Uber and Lyft. So far, the most significant mobilization has been the fight over AB5, a California assembly bill that was signed into law in September 2019, and which makes it much clearer that drivers should be treated as employees of Uber and Lyft. We are at a critical juncture in the history of labor and urban transportation.

In order to sort through the arguments surrounding AB5 and grasp the significance of this moment, this essay does something that the discourse around ride-hailing has failed to do: situate the industry historically, tracing both the continuities and the discontinuities of work in the taxi to Uber economy. I argue that the present moment is largely the product of two neo-liberal shifts in the taxicab industry — and, in a certain sense, in US society as a whole — that occurred in the late 1970s and the 2010s. Understanding the reasons for these shifts can help get beyond the easy assumptions made on different sides of the debate: that employee status is an unalloyed good or ill, that innovation made the rise of Uber and Lyft inevitable, or that the issues raised by the sector are matters of technology rather than politics.

Keywords: Gig Economy, Uber, Lyft, AB5, Work, Taxi, Labor Regulation, Mis-Classification, Gig Workers