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WORK TITLE: Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
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WEBSITE: https://qz.com/author/skesslerqz/
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and author. Mashable, startup coverage manager; Quartz, reporter.
WRITINGS
Also a senior writer for Fast Company.
SIDELIGHTS
Sarah Kessler works primarily within the journalism field. She has held positions with Mashable, Fast Company, and Quartz, having served as a writer for the two latter companies. Some of her writing has received mention in the likes of New York Magazine and the Washington Post. Much of her work deals with the state of the economy as it affects working people. More specifically, she has termed the concept of the “gig economy,” which she elaborates upon in her debut book, Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work.
“When I started working on Gigged, I knew I wanted to tell the story of the “gig economy” through the perspectives of people who were actually working in it,” she told interviewer Shane Snow on the Medium website. “I also wanted to explain how this Silicon Valley idea fit into wider labor trends (spoiler alert: companies have been outsourcing work to non-employees whenever possible for a very long time) and what it meant for our future.”
Gigged tracks the development of the American economy into its modern state, viewed predominantly from the lens of the well-known rideshare company, Uber. By studying Uber’s ascent, Kessler is also able to shine a spotlight down on companies very similar to Uber in their development, as well as their overall effect on the economy and the contemporary job market. As Kessler explains, Uber is one example of businesses that grew out of a brand new business model, which is based more on fulfilling a rising niche. According to Kessler’s research, Uber first came onto the scene in 2013, and was meant to serve as a competitor to the taxi industry.
Much of Kessler’s findings also come from conversations held with employees of Uber and similar business models. She is also able to talk with leaders throughout this particular industry. Through these conversations she is able to learn more about the appeal of this kind of work, as well as its effects. Some of the individuals Kessler speaks with express that working for Uber (or a similar business) provides a type of freedom they wouldn’t be able to obtain through job positions. On the employer’s end, it has become much simpler to find people capable of performing specific jobs as soon as their expertise is needed, all at a cost that is much more affordable than hiring a full-fledged employee. While Kessler can spot the benefits to the “gig economy” job model, she also points out that there are some noteworthy flaws in its system. For one, there needs to be certain governmental measures put into place to help make this economical shift more sustainable and fair for its workers. To further establish her points, Kessler takes a look at similar forms of business-based changes that have taken place throughout American history. One such period was the Industrial Revolution, which also arrived at the precipice of numerous forms of innovation. Because the business model of the period was so new, the government had no regulations on how workers within these new industries should be treated and protected. As a result, employers handled their employees as they saw fit, leading to various forms of mistreatment. “This is a brief study stretched to book length; good points are made, but on the whole it feels light,” expressed a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. One Kirkus Reviews contributor called Gigged “a fair-minded analysis of the ever morphing worldwide labor force” and “an early entry in burgeoning popular literature on the gig economy.” On the Harper’s Bazaar website, Richard Kilgarriff wrote: “Read it because the gig economy affects everyone – employers, employees and consumers.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work.
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Gigged, p. 67.
ONLINE
Fast Company, https://www.fastcompany.com/ (June 12, 2018), Ruth Reader, “‘Gigged‘: A new book explores the promise and peril of the gig economy,” author interview.
Harper’s Bazaar, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/ (June 29, 2018), Richard Kilgarriff, “Bazaar business-book club: ‘Gigged’ by Sarah Kessler,” review of Gigged.
Mashable, https://mashable.com/ (June 14, 2018), Pete Pachal, “Why the gig economy was doomed from the start.”
Medium, https://medium.com/ (June 11, 2018), Shane Snow, “How I Write: Sarah Kessler, author of Gigged,” author interview.
Quartz, https://qz.com/ (August 27, 2018), author profile.
SARAH KESSLER is a journalist based in New York City. She is currently a reporter at Quartz, where she writes about the future of work. Previously, she covered the gig economy as a senior writer at Fast Company and managed startup coverage at Mashable. Her reporting has been cited by The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR.
Shane SnowFollow
Explorer, author, geek. My views are my own.
Jun 11
How I Write: Sarah Kessler, author of GIGGED
“At some point, I realized I should start.”
E
very month, I interview an author with a new book about her or his writing process. This month, it’s Quartz editor Sarah Kessler, a former colleague of mine at Mashable and a fantastic journalist and storyteller.
She’s the kind of writer that gives me a motivating amount of professional jealousy. And her new book, Gigged: The End Of The Job And The Future Of Work, is fantastic. You can learn more about the book here, and about how Sarah writes below this photo of her writing desk:
Sarah Kessler’s minimalist writing station.
What’s your process for a big writing project like GIGGED?
SK: When I started working on GIGGED, I knew I wanted to tell the story of the “gig economy” through the perspectives of people who were actually working in it. I also wanted to explain how this Silicon Valley idea fit into wider labor trends (spoiler alert: companies have been outsourcing work to non-employees whenever possible for a very long time) and what it meant for our future.
I wanted to do all this in a narrative-driven way that would be pleasant to read, rather than in a business book full of bullet points.
I had no plan.
But because I had a full-time job as a reporter, I was already somewhat immersed in this world. When I met someone interesting who worked in the gig economy, I would ask them if we could talk regularly. I started nine relationships like that, and five of them ended up in the book. At the same time, I was reading everything I could about the history of this kind of work, and reporting day-to-day on gig economy businesses and the conversations around them.
At some point, I realized I should start. I used post-it notes to make an outline on the floor of my bedroom. I moved the outline to the wall. I wrote a terrible first draft.
Then, I waited about six months. This ended up being great because it gave me the space I needed in order to see that the first draft was terrible. I rewrote it. I rewrote it again.
What’s the worst gig you ever had?
SK: Early on in the gig economy, for a magazine story, I signed up for a bunch of apps like TaskRabbit and Fiverr to see if I could make the minimum wage. Somehow, I ended up in a proposal flash mob. At the rehearsal, I learned that everyone else was a professional dancer who knew what it meant when someone yelled “sashay!”
The final performance involved stuffed penguins and 10-degree weather. If you were to see a video (which if I can do anything to prevent it, you never will!!), you would spot my unique interpretation of the proper dance moves instantly. I think I made $20 for two hours of rehearsals, plus the performance (which required two hours of travel time and 30 minutes of waiting outside).
What rituals, if any, do you have as a writer?
SK: When I was working on the second and third draft of GIGGED, I would come home from work, make dinner, and then write for a couple of hours before bed. I always made a cup of tea before I started writing, which was a helpful routine that made it easier to transition into writing mode.
What’s your writing toolkit?
SK: I used a software program called Ulysses to write GIGGED. It allows you to write in “sheets” that you can drag and drop to rearrange, which is helpful when you’re thinking in chapters rather than about one short piece.
Where do you go for inspiration?
SK: Anywhere there is great writing. Sometimes that’s reading a perfect magazine story. Sometimes it’s taking a break from facts and reading fiction. Also, a walk will always help.
What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written in your life?
SK: This is such a hard question. I’m sure that I have some amazing poetry tucked away in my high school journals, but I’m going to keep that idea alive by never going back to read it. One piece I loved was about my time hanging out with YouTubers in LA. Another was about how the sharing economy is dead. And of course, that time I tried to make it in the gig economy.
What’s the first book you remember loving?
SK: The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. A novel about teenage boys in Brooklyn and their evolving relationships with Judaism was probably an odd choice for a fifth-grade girl attending Catholic school in rural Wisconsin, but I think that was part of the appeal — it described a world so different from my own at a time in my childhood when I was just beginning to realize that such worlds existed.
What’s your best piece of advice for writers?
SK: Be willing to shift mindsets. Writing, for me, is about letting go and being confident in my instincts. Self-editing, which is a requirement for good writing, requires almost the opposite state of mind. It’s about doubting every word I’ve written and challenging my own ideas.
What do you want written on your tombstone?
SK: “TKTK”
Shane Snow is author of Dream Teams and other books. Get his newsletter about thinking differently, The Snow Report, here.
06.12.18platform wars
“Gigged”: A new book explores the promise and peril of the gig economy
Sarah Kessler, the deputy editor for Quartz at Work and a former reporter for Fast Company, took an in-depth look at what it means to live as a gig worker.
[Photo: FlairImages/iStock]
By Ruth Reader8 minute Read
In the era of the side hustle, more and more people are relying on freelance work as a piece of their overall income. For some, that means consulting, for others it means driving for Uber. But for all gig economy workers, this new labor dynamic conjures big questions about the future of work and how social benefits, like health insurance and paid time off, should evolve.
Sarah Kessler, the deputy editor for Quartz at Work and a former reporter for Fast Company, took an in-depth look at what it means to live as a gig worker in her new book Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work. The book, which comes out today, follows a number of gig workers (an Uber driver, a Mechanical Turk worker, a programmer in New York, a man trying to connect unemployed people in Arkansas with work) as well as companies that are trying to figure out whether contract labor is really worth the financial savings. Kessler also looks at the regulatory landscape and the people who are trying to usher in benefits for this growing class of worker.
We sat down with Kessler to discuss how the gig economy has evolved since she first started covering it, and what the future of work looks like.
Fast Company: How is the book different from the reporting you’ve done in the past?
Sarah Kessler: I wrote my first article about the gig economy in 2011 before it was called the gig economy, and I called it online odd jobs. At the time I was covering startups and I was hearing all of them describe this experience where you could press a button and work would come to you, and it would be flexible and it would be independent and we would all be free from drudgery, and that sounded great. And then a few years later, “Pixel and Dimed” [a Fast Company story from 2014] was kind of me trying to test the pitch of what it would be like to do this work, and so I took a month and I tried to make a living on all these apps.
The idea that this would work the same for everybody—it’s not real. Despite my college degree and all my other advantages. I had a really hard time making a living and it didn’t look anything like the pitch.
FC: How does the book differ from past reporting you’ve done on the gig economy?
SK: There was this conversation in Silicon Valley that the gig economy was awesome, and then you had another narrative about how this was going to be the next sweatshop. Almost nobody was looking at it from the perspective of people actually doing the work in their day-to-day lives.
So the Silicon Valley pitch was true, but that was how it would work for programmers. And I actually did follow a programmer who was a millennial and kind of just graduated from college and he was super bored at his job—like he would work half the day and then have nothing to do, and was just miserable. And so he quit. And by joining a gig economy of programmers, he was able to get enough work where he instantly made as much money as he had made in his full-time job. But he has a highly in-demand skill that is highly paid, and he was able to save a year’s worth of living expenses before he quit his job, and he was able to buy his own health insurance, so he didn’t really feel this sense of instability that some of the other people who I followed did.
FC: A lot of people think of the gig economy in terms of Uber and Lyft, but it’s much larger than that. How did you define it in your book?
SK: I thought of the gig economy not as only Uber and Lyft, which is what everybody talks about, but as ways that technology is making it easier to structure work in ways other than a traditional job. You wouldn’t think of Sears as a gig economy company. But the truth is that they contract the customer service to a company that contracts work to a small business that contracts with an independent contractor, who I followed in Arkansas. He takes customer service calls about people’s air conditioners in his home and has no relationship with Sears—and that’s also the gig economy. There’s a version of this in every industry: There are apps that will fill your shift at a restaurant quickly. Apps for CPAs. Companies like Accenture talking about how they want to try to see the future of the organization as structuring its project-based work.
Pixel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In The Gig Economy
The Food Sharing Economy Is Delicious And Illegal. Will It Survive?
Why A New Generation Of On Demand Businesses Rejected The Uber Model
The Gig Economy Is Being Sued To Death
These Are The Temp Agencies Of The Future
FC: The gig economy was born at a time when we were like trying to get out of the recession and also around the time the Affordable Care Act was getting off the ground. So there was a perfect storm for the rise of the gig economy.
SK: Many decades ago, we made all these policies and laws that attach a kind of social safety net of programs to the idea of a traditional 9-to-5 job. If you’re a freelancer, you don’t have things like minimum wage or paid lunch breaks or workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. So there’s a huge incentive to hire people that way. And I think that that is not going away, and that’s good for companies in bad times and that’s good for companies in good times. So that’s why I’m not sure that this will reverse itself now that we’re in better times. But having said that, there’s not really great data about this.
FC: A recent study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the gig economy is not only small, but that it’s also decreased in size since 2005. What do you make of that?
SK: There are a lot of people who don’t fit into the BLS data that would still be counted as freelancers under other definitions (like people working this way for supplemental income).
But the best estimate we have about what’s called contingent work—which is where it’s not traditional and you’re not directly employed—is [one that was conducted using data from] between 2005 and 2015. [During that time] almost all jobs or work that was added to the U.S. economy was something other than that traditional direct employment. And so that to me suggests that it is the part of the economy that is growing.
Whether or not these types of arrangements become a bigger part of our economy (remember that 24 years after Amazon was founded, only 16% of retail is e-commerce), I think that those weaknesses in how we support workers are important [to pay attention to].
FC: What are the drawbacks of working this way?
SK: I think there’s a reason that modern societies have developed a social safety net of programs, and it’s that when people are safe, they do things like take risks and start businesses and buy—things that are all really good for the economy. And so if we have more people working as independents or in contractor relationships, then we have fewer people who have that safety, and that might be bad for our economy.
FC: How are we seeing regulators respond to this?
SK: There’s been kind of an idea about how we might restructure benefits so that they work better for people working in a freelance environment. But there’s been really no action on that.
What’s interesting is almost everybody agrees that portable benefits—the idea that maybe companies could contribute to a fund when they hire freelancers that freelancers could use to buy things like health insurance or unemployment insurance—are a good idea. But then when you talk about the details, you realize that when the Silicon Valley companies say this is a good idea, it means something very different than when the labor unions think this is a good idea. And so there is more controversy around this than is readily apparent.
FC: What are the good things that have come out of the gig economy? Obviously, there are people who like working this way, though it’s unclear whether it’s like a long-term solution for a lot of people. What did you find?
SK: I talked to “digital nomads” who use freelance work as a way to travel the world and they love it. I talked to a mother who was a former McKinsey consultant who used the gig economy as a way to balance her ambition with her desire to be around for her children at certain times of the day. She could structure her projects flexibly in a way that works for her–and that’s a really good thing. But those people tended to be able to afford to create their own safety net in the form of savings accounts or insurance they purchased themselves.
I also talked to people who weren’t able to do that who also liked working this way but would say things like, “Oh, it’s great for now, but if I ever had kids, like there’s no way I’d be able to do this.” Or “I’m afraid of what would happen if like my one client left me. At any moment, I would be totally unable to pay my bills.” There’s a sense of insecurity that I think is important to pay attention to.
FC: There’s this notion that full-time work can’t be flexible.
SK: And that’s a lie. A company can give their employees unlimited flexibility. But the reality is very few companies do. So a large consulting firm is not going to just totally change the way that it works overnight.
FC: Sometimes the gig economy feels like a stop-gap on the way to a better work format.
SK: It could be a really good thing if we changed the way that we structured our society a little bit. When the industrial revolution happened, and people went from working independently on farms to cities where they worked in factories, we had to figure a lot of things out: Like, maybe we shouldn’t have child labor and we should make laws about that. And like maybe we should build benefits that we’re going to attach to this job. And so I think that there’s an opportunity to do that for the gig economy that would make it a lot better for a lot more people.
Sarah Kessler
Sarah Kessler is a senior writer at Fast Company, where she writes about the on-demand/gig/sharing "economies" and the future of work.
Sarah Kessler
Deputy Editor
Sarah is the deputy editor of Quartz At Work, a new edition of Quartz covering management, office culture, productivity, workplace inclusion, career development, and the chaotic lives of people who think about many of these topics while also trying to raise a family (aka working parents). Before joining Quartz as a reporter covering the future of work in 2016, she covered the gig economy as a senior writer at Fast Company and managed startup coverage as an early employee at Mashable. Her reporting has been cited by The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR. Sarah's first book, about workers in the gig economy, will be published by St. Martin's Press next year.
Kessler, Sarah: GIGGED
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kessler, Sarah GIGGED St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) $25.99 6, 12 ISBN: 978-1-250-09789-7
An examination of how job environment models and opportunities have evolved, mainly through the success of Uber and other gig-economy stalwarts.
Kessler, a reporter for Quartz who previously worked for Fast Company and Mashable, describes Uber's rise to prominence in 2013 after a series of failed fledgling attempts to garner venture capitalist funding and how the unique business model changed the way people taxi. But Uber is just one example within an ever expanding network of job marketplaces eschewing the classic template of an office day job with steady hours and benefits. Though both Snapchat and Instagram emerged from this revolutionary period, Kessler focuses on on-demand business models like Uber's, which became widely scrutinized when it classified its drivers (mostly men) as independent contractors, which "relieved the company from government-mandated employer responsibilities in most countries." The author taps the experiences of a number of Uber drivers and satisfied members of this alternative workforce and provides a comprehensive cross section of workers and developers who have abandoned their unrealistic daily working structure to benefit from the gig economy's flexible business models. She also charts the unique strategies of like-minded on-demand workforce marketplaces such as Mechanical Turk, Managed by Q, and Gigster, demonstrating how their successes were earned and are consistently maintained. By contrast, Kessler spotlights the negative aspects of the gig economy: pay discrepancies (e.g., Uber's fluctuating pricing model which affected drivers' take-home potential), personal injury risk and exposure, and lack of benefits. The author then probes how the gig economy became a hot-button discussion among politicians and world economists and policymakers. In conclusion, the author suggests that the advent of "Uberisation" has encountered a wide-ranging groundswell and its share of potholes and obstacles, and though it remains a potentially lucrative employment alternative for workers and labor innovators alike, there are still great opportunities for much-needed refinement.
A fair-minded analysis of the ever morphing worldwide labor force--an early entry in burgeoning popular literature on the gig economy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kessler, Sarah: GIGGED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375196/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6fbd8b96. Accessed 25 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375196
Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p67+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
Sarah Kessler. St. Martin's, $25.99 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-250-09789-7
Reporter Kessler delivers a stark, skimpy look at the future of work. She begins by describing how, when she graduated from college, in the middle of the 2008 recession, there were few full-time jobs to be had, and increasingly more part-time, "contingent" jobs. She goes on to examine both sides of the gig economy: the one creating opportunity, and the one increasing insecurity and risk. Business leaders quoted here, including Stan Chia of Grubhub and Carole Woodhead of Hermes UK, identify flexibility as a primary benefit of this kind of work, whether it's driving a car for Uber or prowling for short-term tasks on Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdsourced task marketplace. Contrary to Silicon Valley's optimism, the gig economy is not a net positive, argues Kessler, particularly for low-wage workers like the house cleaner she describes commuting two hours to earn $ 10 an hour. Restructuring the way people work is a good idea, the author writes, but it's also necessary to fix the support structures underlying the economy. Kessler concludes that the U.S. needs another labor movement, another New Deal, or similar revolutionary idea to accompany such a radical change, while warning it took decades for legislators to address the comparable disruptions brought by the Industrial Revolution. This is a brief study stretched to book length; good points are made, but on the whole it feels light. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, McCormick Literary (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 67+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099996/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dff85e2e. Accessed 25 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099996
Bazaar business-book club: ‘Gigged’ by Sarah Kessler
Silicon Valley is turning work into a frictionless transaction between buyer and seller, says the author of this provocative new volume
By Richard Kilgarriff
Jun 29, 2018
Getty Images
The vision of services at our fingertips – taxis, cleaners, dog-walkers, accountants, lawyers – has become a powerful reality in recent years. As venture capital pours into smarter, faster, better ways to connect us, we can more easily find the best people for any task, preferably at the right price, at the right time and in the right place.
What’s it about?
Kessler’s book is all about flagging up the unseen consequences of this so-called ‘gig economy’ as we make the transition to a more automated society, in which anything that can be improved or speeded up by processing power has seismic effects on the landscape of work.
This is nothing new. Just as we saw in the industrial revolution of the 1700s, each giant leap in technology causes a vacuum in society, whereby workers are, for a while at least, used and abused by the market until society intervenes with laws, regulation and a more ethical brand of capitalism. That’s not to say that tech entrepreneurs are abusers of human rights; however, the purpose of venture capitalism, which fuels the tech industry and the gig economy, is disruption – and this always has consequences, good and bad, for the workforce.
Why read it?
Read it because the gig economy affects everyone – employers, employees and consumers. If you use an app to search for, buy or sell services, you are enjoying a benefit that has been paid for by a (tech) venture capitalist intent on causing and exploiting disruption in the market. The double-whammy is that the service you are using is likely to be replaced eventually by artificial intelligence – driverless cars, delivery drones and so on. This is not necessarily a terrible thing in the long term, especially if you have faith in humanity to adjust to the labour market. However, it means that we are on the brink of a revolution that may be very painful for many in the medium term, with a sudden surge in exploitation and mass unemployment, not just for taxi drivers and cleaning staff, but for everyone below the top rung of the corporate ladder.
In the book, Kessler speaks to executives such as Julie Sweet, the leader of the professional-services company Accenture in North America, who envisions a world in which some companies only hire C-Suite executives (although, interestingly, she doesn’t see this happening for Accenture any time soon, because the business is “built on relationships”).
To reap the rewards of the gig economy, it seems we must all be prepared to pay the price of progress while continuing to value what makes us human, regardless of the power of technology.
Richard Kilgarriff is the editorial director of Bookomi.
Why the gig economy was doomed from the start
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Image: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images
By Pete Pachal
Jun 14, 2018
For a while there, it seemed like "Uber for X" was the only pitch that mattered.
To many, the rapid rise of Uber wasn't just a major tech success story — it signaled a wholesale change that was coming to how people thought of work. Traditional jobs, the thinking went, would soon become less and less common, with predictable, inefficient employment getting replaced by the flexibility of independent contract work. The "gig economy" was underway, and it was unstoppable.
SEE ALSO: 10 key takeaways for startups that are trying to be the next Uber
Except that it stopped. In her new book, Gigged, reporter Sarah Kessler chronicles the ascent and decline of the gig economy, starting in the early 2010s, when it seemed every service — from grocery shopping to cleaning offices — could be "app-ified" to be done by easily scalable contract work, to the death of many of those services a few years later, when their models proved unsustainable.
Kessler, a former Mashable startups reporter, visited the MashTalk podcast to talk about the gig economy, and its failure.
Gigs that don't translate
One of the main problems, she observed, is that for many jobs outside of driving people from Point A to Point B, the work requires more skill than you think. It turns out that even something as seemingly menial as grocery shopping has nuance to it, and individuals tend to be very particular about the way it's done. Finding the best avocados for you might not be the same as finding the best avocados for me.
"People saw Uber making this business model work, and you had a bunch of people who are experts at starting tech companies launching a service business for cleaning or washing your clothes or whatever," says Kessler, "And it is a lot more complicated and requires a lot of expertise to do those things, and so a lot of them did get in trouble."
Sarah Kessler
Not only did the jobs require more skill than expected, but the gig economy is set up in such a way that work is inherently modular, sometimes varying wildly from contractor to contractor. The problem is customers generally want consistency and reliability, and for many of these tech startups, creating an environment that encourages that — while also offering a cheaper product than traditional employee-driven industries — was too tall an order.
Not all gig economy companies failed, though. One of them, a cleaning company called Managed by Q, ended up pivoting to an employee model, just with the same conveniences enabled by technology that the original contractor model had. There was some sacrifice in nimbleness, but the shift resulted in a better business overall.
"They did make that change, and decided there was a business reason to do so," Kessler explains. "They wanted their cleaners to have relationships with people whose offices they were cleaning, and through those relationships they would start to sell other services like supplies. And you needed to have happy workers who liked your company in order for that to work."
Downfall of 'Uber for X'
The danger of pivoting away from the original gig economy promise is that it's a much tougher sell to investors, who tend to fixate on scale, scale, scale. While there will always be tech startups based around centralizing contract work — and some may even succeed — the central lesson of the gig economy is that it's much harder than it looks.
"You could see in the reviews of some services that they would be raving about one person but then talking about getting your jewelry stolen by the next person. The acquisition cost of trying to go find people, who have no allegiance to you and then pseudo-train them to do what you want to do but then they leave the next week when they find a real job, is pretty high."
You can subscribe to MashTalk on iTunes or Google Play, and we'd appreciate it if you could leave a review. Feel free to hit us with questions and comments by tweeting to @mashtalk or attaching the #MashTalk hashtag. We welcome all feedback.