Radical flexibility: driving for Lyft and the future of work in the platform economy

ABSTRACT

Labour conditions in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the US have become increasingly precarious and abusive. At the same time, many workers and users (no longer easily categorically separated) exhibit a sustained attachment to the idea of flexible work. For workers, internalizing the demand to be flexible as an affirmative choice can be a method of survival. But the demand for flexibility is also connected to an affective sense of agency and a refusal of alienation. For workers, flexibility connects strong convenience with access to fast cash. It connects a sense of play and creative fun with access to infrastructure and transit. The ‘unicorn’ rideshare company Lyft's brand narrative has capitalized on and exploited the desire for flexibility in historically specific political contexts. In light of these sticky financialized appropriations of flexibility, this essay imagines radical flexibility as a wilful re-appropriation. It explores ways that Lyft's rhetoric might be redirected and resisted. In light of existing demands for collective or cooperative platforms, radical flexibility could be a galvanizing justification for a cooperative response to the Uberization of work, part of a broader horizon that reclaims flexibility, play, creativity, and convenience as affects and practices outside of the wage relation.

Disclosure statement

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Notes

1 Over a period of 18 months, I interviewed 11 Lyft drivers at length and with permission to use the interviews for this research. I also spoke informally with many more drivers (between 30 and 40) in their cars, primarily in Los Angeles, but also in Washington DC, and Seattle. I used these informal interviews to get a sense of the range of common positions. I made a qualitative effort to include a range of subject positions, including drivers who created YouTube influencer videos; Nicole Moore of Rideshare Drivers United; drivers who had driven for both Uber and Lyft or Lyft and delivery services; drivers from different parts of Los Angeles and drivers with different experiences of gender and race. I used these interviews to amplify and flesh out the journalism, economic history, and sociological research cited here.

2 Hustle culture is a Silicon Valley idiom for the entrepreneurial work ethos. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was quoted in Business Insider in 2016 saying his company was successful because of their motto, ‘Always be hustling’.

3 Sanjukta M. Paul documents how independent contractors who organize into collectives can be targeted by antitrust laws, while private corporations are not. Paul also suggests pathways towards new forms. She writes of the ‘resilience’ of ‘the deep-seated collective intuition that those who are doing the material work of economic life are entitled to a role in governing it and that indeed we all benefit when they do’. ‘The enduring ambiguities of antitrust liability for worker collective action’. Loy. U. Chi. LJ 47 (2015): 969. (1043)

4 #DeleteUber was a disinvestment campaign. As post-wage-labour activists seek universal and unconditional guarantees, Feher suggests that stakeholders form coalitions in the model of the ‘Defund DAPL’ movement, which combined a broad-based disinvestment campaign with legal battles. ‘Native American activist Jackie Fielder explains: ‘We have the economic power to show companies that when they finance an environmentally racist project … their bottom line will suffer’. (Feher 75)

5 I spoke to at least three LatinX female drivers who chose to drive for Lyft because of a vague sense that it was better for women than Uber. The white men did not care about the politics of the companies. Everyone I spoke with was either unwilling to discuss Trump himself or strongly opposed to him (all interviews took place before the events of January 2021). But these are very small samples from one urban market. There is no question that drivers are now making far less than they were in 2013. Drivers were not, in 2019, making the monthly earnings that Lyft promised, promises which had themselves already gone down from their height in 2014, even though Lyft and Uber were increasingly competing for drivers not only with each other but with delivery services. After both major players went public, investors started to ask when they would have a plan to become profitable. It's not clear which aspect of their model will crumble first. The insurance situation is in flux, as well.

6 Rideshare organizers were sometimes frustrated with old-labour organizers. Author interview with Nicole Moore of Rideshare United on 24 July 2019.

7 For a particularly poignant example of the podcast forcing optimism to the point of cruelty, see ‘I will have won that Grammy’. Smith, Mariah narrator. ‘Pick Me Up!’ Gimlet Media, 23 October 2018, https://gimletmedia.com/shows/pick-me-up/llhd8j/i-will-have-won-that-grammy. Gimlet Creative. iTunes app, 25 September 2018.

8 Interview with Rey Rivas, 24 July 2019.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Michelle Chihara

Michelle Chihara is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Whittier Scholars Program at Whittier College, where she teaches contemporary American literature, media studies, and creative writing. Her book's working title is Behave! –Economics & the science of influence in American popular culture. Recent publications include Postmodern Culture, American Literary History, Post45: Contemporaries, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal and a chapter in New Directions in Print Culture Studies forthcoming from Bloomsbury. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics and currently edits the Econ & Finance section at The Los Angeles Review of Books. In a former life, she was a reporter, and has published fiction, nonfiction, reportage and essays in a variety of publications, online and off.