Amazing, big bucks :p
See How Big the Gig Economy Really Is
A new poll reveals the true size of the peer-to-peer revolution
After 28 years as a matchmaker, Sherry Singer, a 51-year-old resident of Long Beach, Calif., had grown tired of making matches. She had also grown accustomed to the independence of being her own boss as she helped customers find love. But she fretted about where or how to find a new line of work. Then Singer met a woman who said she was making $200 a day working as a freelance courier for Postmates, a San Francisco–based startup specializing in on-demand deliveries from restaurants and stores in major cities, the types of places that wouldn’t normally bring their gourmet burgers or cough syrup to someone’s doorstep. “I said, ‘Sign me up!’” Singer recalls. Within about a week she was patching together a living one order at a time as requests came through on her smartphone, and working whenever she felt like it. No experience or formal interview was required.
Companies like Postmates connect people who want goods and services—whether it’s a meal from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver, a bedroom to stay in for the night or someone to help move a piano—with people who will provide them for a price. These peer-to-peer transactions, numbering in the *hundreds of thousands each day, bypass the traditional employer-employee relationship in ways that are befuddling regulators in cities and states across the country. The new companies—they often call themselves “platforms”—don’t seem to fit the old models. Ride-app company Uber, for instance, has become the fastest-growing startup in history, now valued at more than $60 billion at just five years old. Yet to hear the company tell it, Uber has done this without hiring a single driver; its role is simply providing software that allows willing parties to connect.
This raises many questions, among them: Can algorithms replace human managers? Do these business models demand a rethinking of labor laws? Or are companies just using new tools to get up to old tricks that give them an edge?
There is no one name—whether sharing economy, gig economy or on-*demand economy—that captures the diversity of this disruption. But it’s clear that the demand for this way of working and consuming is profound. According to a first-of-its-kind poll from TIME, strategic communications and global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and the Aspen InstituteFuture of Work Initiative, 44% of U.S. adults have participated in such transactions, playing the roles of lenders and borrowers, drivers and riders, hosts and guests. The number this represents, more than 90 million people, is greater than the number of Americans who identify, respectively, as Republicans or Democrats. (Poll figures exclude adults who are not Internet users.) “This is a disruptive explosion that we’re seeing,” says Michael Solomon, a professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University. “Is it good or bad for workers? The real question is, What kind of worker are we talking about?”
That question is at the center of several lawsuits about how many of these companies have classified their workers. TIME’s poll of 3,000 people, conducted by Penn Schoen Berland in late November, found that 22% of American adults, or 45 million people, have already offered some kind of good or service in this economy. And in doing so, they’ve likely made a trade-off: the typical drivers and handymen using these platforms have operated as independent contractors, which means they enjoy the freedom of working without set hours but are not afforded the safety nets that traditional 9-to-5 employees have. In return, companies like Uber and Postmates save fortunes on employee-*related expenses such as payroll taxes but must give up control over exactly how and when workers do their jobs. Questions about liability and *responsibility—and whether these companies are exercising more control than they’re acknowledging—have led to protests, bans and referendums from San Francisco to New York.
The vast majority of these 45 million people who have so far offered goods or services have other sources of income and describe their experiences in this new economy as positive, according to the poll. About one-third, whom we might call motivated offerers rather than casual ones, aren’t just earning extra bucks; they either make more than 40% of their income in this economy, describe it as their primary source of income or say they can’t get work in a more traditional job. These workers, per the poll, are the ones who most treasure the liberty this type of work provides yet say they miss the security and benefits they’ve traded for it. Take Singer: she started out optimistic, then grew disillusioned as parking fees, smartphone costs and her frustrations with company protocol piled up. Eventually, she signed up to be a lead plaintiff in a suit against Postmates, alleging that she was controlled like an employee and therefore should have been treated like one, getting reimbursements for things like gas, for instance. (The case is pending.) And yet after all that, Singer then started working as a contractor for a ride-app startup in the same economy. “I need to,” she says. “I’m only as good as my last ride.”
http://time.com/4169532/sharing-economy-poll/
See How Big the Gig Economy Really Is
A new poll reveals the true size of the peer-to-peer revolution
After 28 years as a matchmaker, Sherry Singer, a 51-year-old resident of Long Beach, Calif., had grown tired of making matches. She had also grown accustomed to the independence of being her own boss as she helped customers find love. But she fretted about where or how to find a new line of work. Then Singer met a woman who said she was making $200 a day working as a freelance courier for Postmates, a San Francisco–based startup specializing in on-demand deliveries from restaurants and stores in major cities, the types of places that wouldn’t normally bring their gourmet burgers or cough syrup to someone’s doorstep. “I said, ‘Sign me up!’” Singer recalls. Within about a week she was patching together a living one order at a time as requests came through on her smartphone, and working whenever she felt like it. No experience or formal interview was required.
Companies like Postmates connect people who want goods and services—whether it’s a meal from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver, a bedroom to stay in for the night or someone to help move a piano—with people who will provide them for a price. These peer-to-peer transactions, numbering in the *hundreds of thousands each day, bypass the traditional employer-employee relationship in ways that are befuddling regulators in cities and states across the country. The new companies—they often call themselves “platforms”—don’t seem to fit the old models. Ride-app company Uber, for instance, has become the fastest-growing startup in history, now valued at more than $60 billion at just five years old. Yet to hear the company tell it, Uber has done this without hiring a single driver; its role is simply providing software that allows willing parties to connect.
This raises many questions, among them: Can algorithms replace human managers? Do these business models demand a rethinking of labor laws? Or are companies just using new tools to get up to old tricks that give them an edge?
There is no one name—whether sharing economy, gig economy or on-*demand economy—that captures the diversity of this disruption. But it’s clear that the demand for this way of working and consuming is profound. According to a first-of-its-kind poll from TIME, strategic communications and global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and the Aspen InstituteFuture of Work Initiative, 44% of U.S. adults have participated in such transactions, playing the roles of lenders and borrowers, drivers and riders, hosts and guests. The number this represents, more than 90 million people, is greater than the number of Americans who identify, respectively, as Republicans or Democrats. (Poll figures exclude adults who are not Internet users.) “This is a disruptive explosion that we’re seeing,” says Michael Solomon, a professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University. “Is it good or bad for workers? The real question is, What kind of worker are we talking about?”
That question is at the center of several lawsuits about how many of these companies have classified their workers. TIME’s poll of 3,000 people, conducted by Penn Schoen Berland in late November, found that 22% of American adults, or 45 million people, have already offered some kind of good or service in this economy. And in doing so, they’ve likely made a trade-off: the typical drivers and handymen using these platforms have operated as independent contractors, which means they enjoy the freedom of working without set hours but are not afforded the safety nets that traditional 9-to-5 employees have. In return, companies like Uber and Postmates save fortunes on employee-*related expenses such as payroll taxes but must give up control over exactly how and when workers do their jobs. Questions about liability and *responsibility—and whether these companies are exercising more control than they’re acknowledging—have led to protests, bans and referendums from San Francisco to New York.
The vast majority of these 45 million people who have so far offered goods or services have other sources of income and describe their experiences in this new economy as positive, according to the poll. About one-third, whom we might call motivated offerers rather than casual ones, aren’t just earning extra bucks; they either make more than 40% of their income in this economy, describe it as their primary source of income or say they can’t get work in a more traditional job. These workers, per the poll, are the ones who most treasure the liberty this type of work provides yet say they miss the security and benefits they’ve traded for it. Take Singer: she started out optimistic, then grew disillusioned as parking fees, smartphone costs and her frustrations with company protocol piled up. Eventually, she signed up to be a lead plaintiff in a suit against Postmates, alleging that she was controlled like an employee and therefore should have been treated like one, getting reimbursements for things like gas, for instance. (The case is pending.) And yet after all that, Singer then started working as a contractor for a ride-app startup in the same economy. “I need to,” she says. “I’m only as good as my last ride.”
http://time.com/4169532/sharing-economy-poll/