Since 2012, much of the positive discourse around Uber and Lyft has continued to regurgitate the notion that these are companies built on technological innovations that brought new forms of transportation to people and places who needed them. Meanwhile, critiques of these companies, and of the gig economy as a whole, have typically seen Uber and Lyft as breaking sharply from earlier modes of employment to create new forms of precarity for workers. In both cases, the public discussion tends to see these companies as creating major discontinuities, whether of technology or of labor models. What Mark pointed out, however, is that Uber and Lyft are in many ways not as different as we tend to think from the taxi companies that prevailed until 2012.
In 2020, almost a decade after the advent of Uber and Lyft, we seem to be at another turning point. 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. The companies have fought this reclassification in myriad ways, and some drivers fear that it may cause them to lose their flexibility. But those who have welcomed the passage of AB5 hope it will deliver them many of the benefits—from healthcare to a guaranteed minimum wage—that Uber and Lyft have so far denied them. On all sides of the issue, no one doubts that we are at a critical juncture in the history of labor and urban transportation.
But in order to sort through the arguments surrounding AB5 and grasp the significance of this moment, we must do something that the discourse around ride-hailing has failed to do: situate ourselves historically, tracing both the continuities and the discontinuities that the cabbie Mark pointed to. Our present moment is largely the product of two neoliberal 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 us 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.
Few people understand those reasons better than the drivers themselves—though, like other workers, they rarely have their voices centered in public discourse. By listening to drivers’ accounts of how their industry operates and has changed, we can come to understand how and why, despite some fears and ambivalence, they are using employee status to create a much-needed friction in the wheels of technocapital.