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The idea is to reward loyalty and prevent drivers from having Uber and Lyft open at the same time. The thing is, if you’re working 40 or 50 hours a week with one company, that looks a lot less like a gig and a lot more like full-time employment.

In Los Angeles, September 2014, a group of Lyft drivers burned their pink mustaches in protest of the pay cuts. These kinds of actions aren’t very common because most of us don’t know our co-workers and there is no physical location to congregate. Lyft doesn’t allow their drivers at the head office. The main place for “sharing economy” workers to connect is through online forums and Facebook groups

Yes, people have been kicked off Postmates for complaining. I’ve talked to them. And yes, the official Postmates courier group on Facebook is censored to erase anything that could be perceived as a complaint. But more importantly it’s clear that Postmates is not preparing its workers for the realities of life as an independent contractor. Many are shocked about how much they have to pay in taxes and how little they’re making doing the work. There are plenty of screenshots showing that some are making less than minimum wage.

I ended up having to take on all kinds of little expenses like these. It’s part of the risk of starting your own business. That time, I just had to buy a $3 froyo but it can be a lot worse (parking tickets in San Francisco can be over $80). Oftentimes you have to choose between parking illegally or being late with an order.

All the risk falls onto the worker and the company is free of liability—despite the placard being an explicit suggestion that it’s okay to break the law if that’s what you’ve got to do to get the order done on time. 

Postmates responded by “updating” the app to a “blind system” in which we could still accept or reject jobs, but without enough information to determine whether it would be worth our time or not (e.g., a huge grocery store order). To make sure we accept jobs quickly without analyzing them, the app plays an extremely loud and annoying beeping noise designed specifically to harass couriers into submitting to the algorithm.

One of the best companies I worked for is called Washio. I picked up dirty laundry and delivered clean laundry. It was the best paying and least stressful of all the apps I worked with that month because there was no illusion of choice. Washio tells you exactly what to do and you do it. It is simple and honest. But it also betrays the spirit of the independent contractor, and that’s important for a number of reasons.

Plenty of people requested that I drop off their food at the door. Customers grow to love apps that make the worker anonymous. That way, you don’t have to feel guilty about having servants.

This “performance indicator over ratings” feeling was even stronger with food delivery workers. They expressed even less concern about the issue, focussing more on their delivery metrics such as attendance and cancellations. The rider app screens we were shown support this.

This makes sense for both food delivery and transit: the customer has little to no ability to use workers’ reputation data to inform their purchase decision. (When we press a button to order a cab or for food to be delivered, speed is the primary factor and platforms emphasise that in their design.)

It was a radically different story for tradespeople. Their reputation data feels important to them, and they prefer to keep control over it. They preferred word of mouth reputation and recommendations, as there was no middleman who could take that away from them. Online platforms were seen as something to graduate away from once you had a sufficient “real world” presence.

Alongside our user research, James Darling looked at the technical possibilities, drawing on the Resolution Trust’s initial work and the research that our policy intern did. They came up with five possible solutions and gave them names and some logos. They are in increasing order of complexity.

Personal referenceThis is the status quo: when approaching a new employer, workers create their own CVs, loosely standardised by convention.

Publicly hosted reputationsWhat feels like a technical quick win is to ensure that a platform hosts a publicly accessible web archive of all worker reputation data, including for profiles which have been disabled. This would allow workers to provide a URL to anyone they wish to provide their reputation data. How would this be encouraged/enforced?

Profile verificationHow does a worker prove that they are the owner of a publicly hosted reputation profile? There are a few technical solutions that could be explored here, like a public/private key verification or explorations around OAuth. Is it possible to create something that is secure, but also usable?

Decentralised open data standardA data standard for reputation data could be created, allowing automated transfer and use of reputation data by competing platforms or external services. Creating the standard would be the trickiest part here: is it possible to translate between both technical differences of different platforms (eg 5 stars versus 80%), but also the values inherent in them.

Centralised data holderPerhaps one way to help standardise and enforce this easy transfer of reputation data is to create some sort of legal entity responsible for holding and transferring this reputation data. A lot of discussion would have to be had about the legal framework for this: is it a government department, a charity, a de facto monopoly?

We also thought about ways to verify identity (by including an RSA public key), what a best practice data standard might look like (here’s an example in JSON), and what the import process might look like (via a mock competitor site). The code for all this is on Github, and everything above is available in a slide deck here.

I worry that the concept of “owning” people’s ratings reflects some deeper, more systemic issues around who “owns” things more generally in society. In the coming months, we’d like to keep working with like minded organisations to explore that idea more, as well as how the cumulative effects of those systems affect us all.