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IT WAS , but not as we know it. At midnight on 1 December, about 100 workers in New York City logged out of the Uber app on their phones in protest over a pay cut at UberRUSH, a delivery service run by the ride-sharing giant. One post on the Facebook page they created to rally the strike and list their demands read: “All we are asking is that Uber treats us fairly.”

Those couriers aren’t the first to feel the pinch from the gig economy (see “Gigging by numbers“). Also called the sharing economy, it is made up of companies like Uber, Taskrabbit and Airbnb, their success founded on forgoing the traditional workplace in favour of labour and services sourced through smartphones. People who work via these apps are classed as independent contractors rather than full employees. They are also isolated from each other and from their companies.

“A lot of these start-ups and apps are using tech and an app-based platform to distance themselves from the people carrying out the work,” says Margaret Dewhurst. Since 2011, she has been a bike courier in London for same-day delivery services like CitySprint or Deliveroo. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, all these apps. You have to do so much more than a normal job and get so much less security and perks.”

“With all these apps, you do so much more than a normal job and get so much less security and perks”

Earlier this year, Dewhurst joined in a campaign organised by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, a London-based group representing “the unorganised, the abandoned and the betrayed”. In October, it successfully lobbied courier company Gophr to commit to paying on-demand workers a living wage.

The idea of sourcing labour online as and when needed has its roots in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Founded in 2005, long before smartphones really took off, it lets people earn small sums by completing online tasks – categorising images, say – for paying clients. It’s also where gig-economy workers began organising, via the online forum Turker Nation. Kristy Milland, its community manager, says Mechanical Turk was designed “to isolate workers”. Turker Nation offers a virtual water cooler where they can meet each other, share tips and air grievances. Turkers also rely on tools like review network Turkopticon to flag problematic tasks or clients.

“Facebook is one of the main platforms for labour activism – even Walmart employees are using it”

Companies that have followed Amazon’s example are seeing their workers organise too. Last year Uber and Lyft drivers in California teamed up with a local union to form the California App-Based Drivers’ Association. Other cities have experienced Uber strikes like the one in New York. Facebook has become one of the main platforms for labour activism – even the employees of US retail giant Walmart have a Facebook page dedicated to improving their conditions.

Software as boss

Gig workers frequently complain about a lack of communication between themselves and bosses – a problem compounded by the fact that their immediate “boss” may well be an algorithm.

Min Kyung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has interviewed Uber and Lyft drivers to try to understand what it’s like to be bossed around by software. She found that some struggled with the way it assessed their willingness to take work.

At Uber, for example, a driver’s acceptance rate should not be below around 80 per cent. But there’s no opportunity for drivers to point out that a passenger they rejected had been flagged on worker forums for bad behaviour, or for female drivers to explain that they were uncomfortable picking up someone with no profile picture late at night. The star-rating system was another bone of contention. Some drivers thought passengers didn’t understand it and thus unintentionally gave low scores.

San Francisco photographer Anna Vignet, who briefly did deliveries on request via apps Postmates and DoorDash, also , saying they left her with lots of downtime between assignments, or sprang an impossibly far address on her. Calls to the companies’ helplines went unanswered. “Given that these companies can’t deliver food without us couriers, it’s remarkable how unfinished their support services are,” she wrote.

Is there scope to tailor apps more closely to the needs of crowdsourced workers? Maybe, says Lee. Platforms like Uber could assess customer reviews subjectively, rather than just taking the star rating as gospel. She’s also toyed with the idea of an “altruistic metric” that scores workers for traits other than efficiency.

There is another option: leave and build a better workplace. Last month, a in New York City discussed ways to return power to distributed, app-bound workers. One way would be to set up cooperatives such as Stocksy, a picture agency owned by its contributors, and the driver-owned Transunion Car Service, a taxi company that launched in New Jersey in March. Transunion promises its drivers perks like shares in the firm, plus healthcare and retirement benefits.

Milland says she is intrigued by the idea, although she can foresee legal and financial obstacles. She envisions a platform where all workers can access support and training, vote on new initiatives, and receive rewards and promotions for their efforts. “If you have people in power within the co-op who are workers and have been there, you’ll see a different service,” she says.

The inherent imbalance between workers and employers in the gig economy has caught the eye of government officials. In July, the US Federal Trade Commission held a workshop exploring the associated “competition, consumer protection and economic” issues.

In September, the US House of Representatives held its own hearing. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank in Washington DC, testified that to cover the new world of work. “If the sharing economy is used as a way to circumvent them, then it will impose substantial costs on society,” he said.

These are the early salvos in a battle that is just getting started. The speed and efficiency of online communication is already shaping the future of work. Now, workers are beginning to push back.

(Image: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

This article appeared in print under the headline “App comrades unite”