‘The Gig Is Up’ Review: The Perils of Platform
Work, Personified
A spry, engaging doc with more breadth than depth in
its examination of the effects of the exploding gig economy on gig workers
worldwide.
By Jessica
Kiang
https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/the-gig-is-up-review-1234959536/
Californian
Uber driver Annette breaks down in tears at the wheel of the car she can
scarcely afford to fill with gas. In Lagos, Mitchell rarely sleeps through the
night for fear of missing out on one of the more lucrative online tasks listed
on Mechanical Turk. In Paris, Leila tries to wrangle backpay for a fellow
Deliveroo rider who was grievously injured on the job. These and dozens of
other stories are the bite-sized examples of the everyday cruelty and
dehumanization of the gig economy, the ever-expanding system of global
capitalist exploitation that Shannon Walsh’s almost paradoxically fresh-faced
and accessible documentary “The Gig Is Up” aims to highlight.
The gig
economy itself is bigger even than Walsh’s globetrotting film suggests, also
involving offline seasonal jobs, on-call work and all manner of temporary
contracts (a freelance film critic clears her throat nervously). But here the
focus is on the kind of casual employment that is mediated through online
platforms, from the more visible services like Uber, Deliveroo, Lyft and
TaskRabbit (as well as Chinese iterations fielded by corporations like Tencent
and Alibaba) to the “ghost work” performed through businesses such as
Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Amazon’s massive, crowdsourced labor offering.
To
demystify a landscape that hides behind anodyne-sounding jargon in much the
same way that rival food delivery services brand their riders in cheerfully
color-coded rainjackets, Walsh has a panel of authors, entrepreneurs and
journalists to hand. These experts provide valuable pattern-identification and
big-picture context for a dauntingly labyrinthine system in which it can be
hard for us laypeople — the end users of many of these services — to understand
the ethical impact of the choices we make.
But Walsh’s
real agenda lies in the individual stories she uncovers from the workers on the
frontlines, the unter class created by the Uber economy. In DP Étienne Roussy’s
appealing, easy-on-the-eye portraiture, we move from a Nigerian MTurker doing
transcription work in a cab snarled up in traffic, to the TaskRabbiter son of a
carpenter assembling a family’s Ikea wardrobe, to a Shenzhen landfill in which
hundreds of thousands of branded bicycles — casualties of the
food-delivery-service wars — are piled up like skeletons in a mass grave. These
snapshots are variously chilling, galvanizing and moving, especially when it
becomes clear how much the full-time Uber driver or year-round MTurker is made
to feel personally responsible for their dwindling incomes. There is a kind of
Machievellian genius in a company outsourcing everything to its workers — even
their own exploitation.
At times,
however, you can almost feel Walsh’s instincts pulling away from the main
thrust of her argument as she happens on a personality whose point of view is
less representative of the wider issues than intricately interesting in its own
right. Jason, an online worker living on the poverty line in Mims, Florida,
with his scratchcard-addict mother, is a case in point. His cheerful grifting
of the MTurk system (for the purposes of some survey work, the gold-toothed,
white ex-con presents himself as “a Black republican”) could serve as the
subject of an entire film, one in which the sheer pointlessness of so much of
this “work” is also examined.
As
insightful as it often is, “The Gig Is Up” sets itself a remit that is just too
broad to fully explore in its brisk 89 minutes. It’s not just that individual
stories are necessarily curtailed, a lot of the film’s most provocative strands
remain underdeveloped. The conundrum by which these companies can establish
such influential monopolies, acquire expensive premises, and have a huge share
value while also declaring a deficit. The irony of quitting a job because you
want to “be your own boss” but discovering you’re now the underling of an
algorithm. The “Black Mirror”-esque dystopia that is one poor rating, from an
unthinking customer, cratering your reputation and killing your earnings
potential. And the absolutely chilling omnipresence of some of these
corporations: If there is a polite word to describe the practice of Amazon
paying overseas casual workers in Amazon gift cards, I don’t know what it is.
“I don’t think of it as real money. It’s … Amazon money,” says MTurker Tomisin,
his face changing as he realizes he’s coined a phrase that essentially
acknowledges the tech giant’s imperviousness to traditional economic
principles: It is an economy.
Walsh’s
film, which certainly rates a 4.7 or higher for timeliness, does include some
hopeful green shoots in the form of emerging activism movements aimed at
extending basic worker protections to parts of this newly emerged workforce.
But the overall effect of this fast-paced, broad-based but scattered primer is
to show how difficult solidarity is to achieve when so many buy into the gig
economy’s promise of freedom and egalitarianism, and only find out it’s a lie
when they’re too far in to get out.
‘What are the options?’: a new film on the toll
of the gig economy
In the new documentary The Gig Is Up, film-maker
Shannon Walsh travels around the world to uncover the human cost of the new way
many of us work
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Tue 28 Sep
2021 07.11 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/28/the-gig-is-up-documentary-gig-workers-economy
Jason
Edwards would find it a struggle to pass a job interview with his prominent
gold teeth and criminal record. But he has something more powerful than a suit,
shirt, tie, clean shave and polished shoes. He has a laptop and guile.
Edwards
works from home by filling in online surveys. It is not typically lucrative
work, paying just a few cents. But Edwards, who is white, figured out that by
posing as an African American Republican, his opinions would be much sought
after. He reckons he has earned more than $30,000.
“If you
didn’t cheat the system the way I do, you’re not going to make a respectable
amount of money,” he observes from a modest house in Mims, Florida, where he
cares for an ailing mother who loves smoking and lottery scratchcards.
This is
just one bittersweet story told in The Gig Is Up, a new documentary that shines
a light on the human side of the gig economy, now worth more than $5tn a year
globally and spurred further by the coronavirus pandemic. It includes, of
course, the now familiar hustle of driving or delivering for companies such as
Uber, Amazon and Deliveroo.
But there
is also a bigger and more mysterious army of “ghost workers”: millions of
people around the world who provide the elusive human factor in artificial
intelligence, from completing surveys to transcribing audio recordings or
tagging images and other data. While they gain work-from-home flexibility, they
earn a pittance, must provide their own computer, broadband and power and have
to cope without a safety net, trade union or the consolation of office banter.
“There is a
Big Brother aspect to that, where there’s no one to call,” says the director,
Shannon Walsh, by phone from Vancouver, Canada. “That was one of the big things
we heard around the world, that sense that you were at the peril of a machine.
Get a bad rating, if someone’s in a bad mood one day, and you lose your job and
your livelihood. It’s a next level of precarity.”
The Gig Is
Up is the fifth feature film for Walsh, 45, a Canadian who has had spells
living in South Africa and Hong Kong and always had an interest in uncovering
stories that are most neglected. She was intrigued by the way gig work offers
the illusion of technological utopia on slick phone apps but hides an entire
underclass of workers.
“In the
early 2000s we used to talk about globalisation and the outsourcing of jobs
into parts of the world where you could find cheap labour,” she says. “With the
advent of the platform economy, we really see this flattening of the global
workforce. The haves and have nots each exist in each country.
“Someone
doing a job in rural Florida is actually doing the exact same job as someone in
Lagos or someone in Mumbai. I found it fascinating how that shift has happened
with the growth of multinational corporations. What we saw in those early days
has really transformed into something else.”
Within the
US, Walsh found that gig work throws a lifeline to people shut out of the
formal economy for reasons such as disability, caring for an elderly parent or
children, or having undocumented immigrant status or a criminal record that
would show up on a background check. In some cases, they are desperate.
“It’s not
the idea of a student making pizza money: that is what the companies want us to
believe. It’s folks who need this kind of work and don’t have a lot of other
options in many cases and who are working for multiple platforms to try and
scrape together a living.”
A delivery
driver knows that a single spilled drink or spoiled meal can result in
career-ending complaint from a customer. On the flip side some “independent
contractors”, as they are euphemistically known, relish the autonomy and
flexibility of not being tied to the 9-to-5 commute, freeing them to attend
their child’s school concert or sports game or explore their own creativity
Walsh’s
travels for the film included Nigeria, where gig work is both liberating and
crushing. Some perform menial online tasks for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
platform, sometimes for just a few cents, and are paid in Amazon gift cards.
One
Nigerian interviewee, a trained architect, does 3D design work for architecture
firms in the US along with far more soulless work. Walsh says: “You’ve got this
paradox where you’ve got folks like him working for Amazon gift cards in one
breath and then also having this incredible untapped amount of human creativity
and expertise.”
She
extrapolates: “This new kind of evolution of platform-based work can’t be
painted with one brush. There’s this incredible sense of human creativity
connected like we’ve never had before and yet at the same time, it’s a race to
the bottom in terms of not taking into account what that means for the
transformation of labour and the future of work.
“If we’re
going to ask people to be available and ask them to bring their creativity and
human intelligence to the table, how does that shape the way we have to think
about what we need around labour? In the US, the idea of having a base of
support and security that is not reliant on the companies doing that is going
to be ground zero in the conversation.”
Many of the
film’s subjects speak wearily about the isolating effects of gig work,
especially since the apps are actively designed to prevent workers meeting each
other and organising. But Walsh observes: “What’s always amazing is that, like
the grass that grows through the cracks in the pavement, people find ways to
find each other.
“We heard
great stories in India about folks doing platform based work on computers who
would find each other on Reddit forums, call each other and just leave the
phone off the hook while they worked because that sense of community around
work is essential. People will find a way to be in community.”
The process
of how society, and notoriously tech-illiterate governments, get to grips with
gig work, regulates it and forges a new social contract is only just beginning.
Last week elected officials in New York City passed legislation for gig economy
and food delivery workers, setting minimum pay, allowing workers to keep more
of their tips and limiting how far workers can be asked to travel for
deliveries.
But there
is a long way to go to curb the power of corporations that have found in gig
work a way an army of labour that not even 19th-century coal barons and factory
bosses could have dreamed of.
Walsh
comments: “The big names are problematic on so many levels. They’re trying to
bend the rules for their benefit and governments by and large for a long time
have been letting them do that. It’s also that question of policy not quite
being where tech is. It’s so often the case that stuff’s already happened by
the time governments catch up to understanding what is happening.”
Back in
Mims, Florida, Jason Edwards cannot bear to watch The Gig Is Up because his
mother died just after it was made. But he still has the gig economy. Walsh
reflects: “I really felt a lot for him through the process. What are the
options in a place like where he lives?
“And this
is true for a lot of the US, unfortunately. What are the work options that are
available to you? A lot of them are not good. Like he said when I first
interviewed him, ‘Well, before this, I was dealing drugs.’ What else is he
going to do?”
The Gig Is
Up is out in the US on 8 October with a UK date to be announced
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