Forum Introduction

From their powerful opening explication of the faux community of a Lyft YouTube commercial through their incisive unmasking of then New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani’s criminalization of taxi drivers, their expansive readings of passenger legal complaints, and their listening to the voices of drivers throughout, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray advance more than our understanding of the aptly named “Uber Economy.” Gig work emerges as another iteration of exploitation; rather than technological determinism, we have a political economy of regulation that encourages the insidiousness of biocapitalism. Hua and Ray transform how to think about social reproduction by tying such processes to the afterlife of slavery and the evolution of racial capitalism. They claim, “If we understand racial power to reside in and define the contours of how life is made valuable, reproductive labor is always an operation of racial power.”1 They further show the significance of notions of exchange, uneven benefits, and citizenship status to racialized processes of visibility. Grounded in intersectional feminist theory, historical archives, legal cases, and public documents, as well as in the worlds of drivers themselves, Spent behind the Wheel insists that bodies do matter. This book delivers a powerful critique in four swiftly paced chapters framed by an introduction providing an astute roadmap and a conclusion accounting for Covid times. It does so without losing hope for a better world that values our interdependency and those who make living possible.

The 1970s Marxist feminist concept of social reproduction is having a revival, with writings by Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, and others resonating with the precariousness of this moment.2 The growing literature on care work, social reproduction, and intimate labor has built theory from the example of women in feminized occupations, particularly transnational mothers and domestic workers of various types.3 Some have considered gestational surrogacy and the commodification of life itself through the selling of genes and body parts.4 Hua and Ray expand social reproduction theory and its significance by addressing what constitutes such labor, who performs it, and how its impact sustains inequality. Indeed, they posit that devaluing and deskilling “collapses labor with body,” making some “tasks . . . as mundane or everyday to be beneath the skill of innovation and expertise”—such as attending to others (66). Hua and Ray illuminate public reproduction by tracing the movement of “gendered and racialized reproductive labor, the ‘private’ preconditions of others’ productive labor, in the realm of the public itself” (119). Theirs is the best racialized account of reproductive labor to date. We learn how public policy and legislation (or lack of enforcement of standards) maintain racialized gender hierarchies within the capitalist order.

Hua and Ray recast a male-dominated industry—indeed, one with an immigrant and person-of-color workforce—into an arena of social care. Drivers cater to the needs of others, who desire that the “servant” be unobtrusive. They care for the city, connecting its parts into a whole, in the process of allowing passengers to go about their business and pursue their lives. In comparing regulation in New York City and San Francisco, Hua and Ray situate driving as part of a matrix of transportation, the public access to which the ride companies end up deteriorating much as other privatization ventures that undermine the social wage. Like household workers, a service sector that Hua and Ray not only have written about but also have advocated with, drivers as independent contractors have come to stand outside the labor law—a relic of the New Deal labor standards regime that excluded Black-dominated household and agricultural sectors. Assumptions about deservingness continue to rationalize “the structural reproduction of Black and other nonwhite, noncitizen workers as valuable only insofar as they care for (or work to ensure) the lives of others” (54), Hua and Ray conclude.

The car has become an extension of the private home, a confined space for the worker even as notions of property and ownership, as in the purchasing of taxi medallions, sucks the worker into self-exploitation and debt. In unraveling the regulation of taxis and the failures to regulate ride-sharing companies, Hua and Ray expose myths of freedom embedded in the American dream. Like home-based workers who pay for electricity, machines, and other tools of production, drivers supply the capital, often buying or leasing cars from the very companies on whom they depend for customers; the worker pays for car maintenance, gas, and passenger amenities. They drive long hours and distances to recoup expenses and earn rent. “What is distressing is that ownership of one’s own time and of a medallion or car is both a promise of freedom,” Hua and Ray note, “and the means of demise: ownership of the right to drive is what imperils drivers’ life chances” (41). Flexibility and freedom further emerge as the key terms pitched by the ride-share companies. Such notions pervaded the successful 2020 campaign (Proposition 22) to overturn California’s reclassification of drivers as employees subject to labor standards. Thus, when it came to health and safety during the pandemic, drivers were on their own. But they have remained subject to digital surveillance, the tyranny of the logarithm, that extracts data from passengers and drivers alike—a form of unfreedom.

The case of professional driving, whether for Uber and Lyft or taxis, illuminates the ways that capital accumulation sucks the vitality of reproductive laborers. The value of some lives, Hua and Ray powerfully argue, depends on the devaluing of others, those who make the world work for others at the expense of their own health and well-being and are used up in the servicing of the deserving or, to put it otherwise, who are spent in reproducing others to the detriment of their own reproduction. That is, car services enhance the “flourishing” of life to the extraction of vital energy, the spending of life, of the drivers themselves. Drivers lack access to toilets, water, or shade; they often are barred from hotel or restaurant restrooms and have no place to park their car for a quick break. They have to keep on driving to make ends meet. Here the authors offer a compelling expansion of the concept of accommodation and the contours of disability. They parse the relationship between disability and labor “where conceptualizations surrounding productive work shape notions of disability as an unsightly inability to work” (105) and where the claims of employers determine worker compensation. What is at stake, they emphasize, is not accommodation for drivers but “the denial of liveliness” (109), the harms that come from the nature of the work that falls outside of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Rather than targeting drivers for refusing to pick up those with wheelchairs or companion dogs, liability should shift to the ride-share companies who need to figure out “how to restructure a discriminatory and harmful public service” (111). Hua and Ray call for passengers and drivers to recognize their interdependence. In this regard, their insights on California’s In-Home Supportive Services illuminate the structural interrelationship between provider and client or customer, subject to the same restrictive paradoxes law imposes on other service workers inside and outside of the home: low pay and irregular hours keep the worker dependent on the income stream—and poor—while the recipients of their labor lack adequate access.

In assessing the criminalization of drivers, Hua and Ray expose the limits of liberal antidiscrimination law and its single-axis focus on harm. They provide a feminist-of-color critique of legal cases against drivers involving sexual assault. While they believe women, they also contextualize “the racial narratives of masculine threat that shape public perception of drivers in ways that antagonize driver against (particularly vulnerable and/or feminine) passenger . . . [and] that this antagonism uses gender as cover to obscure the racial premises facilitating industry accumulation” (76). Such conflicts are produced and made by corporate decisions in the guise of “scientific” algorithms but also by state needs to reproduce the social order. Punishment of bad apples does not upend the responsibility of Uber and Lyft for their business model. Neither does it address the exposure of drivers to robbery, airborne sickness, and occupational injuries from hours of sitting.

Particularly striking is the ethical responsibility that Hua and Ray accepted in undertaking their research. “Given that drivers are in positions much more precarious than our own,” they confess, “we hesitated to focus on methodological decisions that might further extract low-wage, exhausted driver-organizers’ energies in ways that would not add to their central mission or life chances” (19). While they conducted some interviews and observed meetings, Hua and Ray eschewed ethnography. They did not engage in impersonation, a tactic often used to gain access by working the job under study. Rather, they engage in cultural and legal analysis, archival reconstruction, and theoretical interpretation. They make excellent use of surveys and interviews and existing literature, building on previous scholars rather than searching for workers to grill. Indeed, they generously quote other researchers, as well as from existent driver interviews, another indicator of citational practices that credit those they build upon.5 In doing so, they make an original contribution to social reproduction theory, the new world of work, and theories of racial capitalism.

In short, Hua and Ray weave an analysis that connects the gig economy and its constant generation of data through surveillance of workers and users to benefit capitalist accumulation with intersectional feminist understandings of embodied labor. Their vision of interdependency has much to teach us as we struggle for alternatives to neoliberal greed amid the false hope of the “sharing” economy.

Author Profile

Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, specializes in home-based work, social reproduction, and the racialized gendered state. Her books include Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (1994); Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care (2010), coedited with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas; Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, with Jennifer Klein (2012); and Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (2019). She is writing on domestic workers, less than free labor, and the 1947 slavery case, U.S. v. Ingalls.