Are You an Independent Contractor If an App Sets Your Hours?

A new Slate piece looks at gig economy cable installers who sign on with apps that require them to work twelve-hour days, six days a week.

So this morning I asked whether I should start taking more Lyfts and Ubers, with the majority of the conversation being about whether I should feel guilty for spending the money, and only a tiny parenthetical at the end about “should I feel guilty for contributing to the gig economy too?”

How Many Ubers and Lyfts Can I Take Before it Costs More Than a Car?

Which—it’s like, I was starting to feel okay about it, like maybe Lyfts and Ubers were all right, and then I read this new Slate article about the gig economy and now I’m feeling guilty again.

Think Your Cable Company Mistreats ​ You? Your Cable Guy Has It Worse.

Slate and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute examine the world of cable installation contract workers, many of whom work through CSG International, which manages its workforce via “an app, called TechNet, used by more than 50,000 technicians each day installing cable across North America for Comcast, Time Warner, and a dozen other cable, internet, and utility providers.”

One unnamed contract worker works a thirteen-hour day (plus an hour commute on both ends) and earns $225.53—which drops to $127.38 net pay once he subtracts the $30 he spends on gas, the $20.83 truck rental, and the $47.32 he needs to set aside for taxes.

$225.53 for thirteen hours is $17.35 per hour, which might seem like a living wage, but it’s really $9.80 an hour after taxes and expenses. What’s more important is that the app this contract worker uses schedules him down to the minute, cancels his lunch break if a job takes too long, and doesn’t pay him if a customer cancels a job, even if he’s already driven out to the customer’s location.

In other words: he only gets paid for the jobs he completes, not for the hours he works—even though the app sets and controls his hours.

True independent contractors are supposed to decide their own schedules and choose their own clients — proof that they aren’t economically dependent on a single employer. But the installers are scheduled for 12-hours shifts, six days a week, including holidays — and the day doesn’t end until the app stops assigning jobs. If a tech logs out early, it’s tracked as a “call-out” — and techs who call out too often are suspended or fired. “They might pop on a job from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., but it’s already 4 p.m. and that job is 25 miles away,” says [contract worker Damon Franklin]. During his months as a cable installer, he says he hardly ever got home before his son went to bed. “It was always, ‘Daddy, I never get to see you anymore!’ ” If his son woke up sick, Franklin could never stay home with him, and he also couldn’t get sick himself; he was told that if a tech wants to take an (unpaid) day off, he needs to submit the request in writing two weeks ahead of time — a policy that [contract worker Harry Benion] says is standard operating procedure for every cable contractor that he’s worked for in Michigan.

Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week.

There’s a lot in the Slate piece that’s worth reading—including the part where we learn that many of these contract workers don’t know they need to pay self-employment tax (or even that they need to save tax out of their paychecks to begin with) because they don’t realize they’re independent contractors—but here’s one more data point especially relevant to Team Billfold:

According to new research by labor economists at Harvard and Princeton, the number of Americans engaged in these alternate work arrangements grew by 66 percent between 2005 and 2015, possibly constituting “all of the net employment growth in the U.S economy” during that time.

Wow. I’d love to know how many of those jobs were positions that could have been technically categorized as “employees,” and how much income those workers lost during the shift—and during each app-controlled shift.

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