Interdependency and the Stakes of Human Lives in Driving Economies

Spent behind the Wheel makes an important contribution to the study of gendered reproductive labor by arguing that taxi driving is intimate work.1 In other words, for drivers, this work crosses the boundaries between home and work, spaces of private and public, and distinctions between self and other that are characteristics of reproductive and particularly domestic labor. Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray situate their study in the longer history of feminist labor scholarship, specifically the theorizing of reproductive labor. One of the arguments feminist scholars of labor have been making for decades is that so-called reproductive work is potentially as physical, dangerous, productive, socially necessary, and economically important as more visible public-sphere work. What makes work reproductive? It engages practices that transfer energy directly from the person performing it into the beneficiary. There is no commodity required to transfer its value between the person who generated it and the person who received it. Capitalism relies on this transfer of “vital energy” as the motor for growth and accumulation in ever new but also always familiar ways.2 Developed to describe the social and economic value of unremunerated practices of care, attention, or support that are usually uncontracted, uncounted, or otherwise invisible, “reproductive labor” also marks work that is under- or unregulated because of its partial or complete invisibility.

Hua and Ray argue convincingly that much of the profit made by ride-hail app companies results from their exploitation of the reproductive labor and self-reproductive capacities of drivers. Importantly, the authors work with archives and interviews detailing the history of organizing by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance in parallel with their analysis of legislation and public media documentation of the machinations of Uber and Lyft vis-à-vis worker and passenger concern and complaint.

The chapters of Spent behind the Wheel catalog and analyze the everyday injustices and daily draining of vitality in the lives of drivers following the introduction of ride-hail apps. Bringing the work of driving passengers into the purview of scholarship on reproductive, intimate labor, the authors illustrate how the lives of drivers become part of an economy that is organized to use them up, not to sustain them. Bringing together interviews with drivers, case law, and labor-organizing histories, they think through the ways that drivers protest and push back against their exploitation as part of how they understand and theorize the work of passenger driving. The result is a convincing and heterogeneous picture, at multiple scales, of how the lives of drivers figure into a rapidly changing workplace in the era of Uber and Lyft. One compelling conclusion of the authors is that “driving is an industry that deals in human life” (11). For example, they find high rates of kidney and bladder diseases, muscle and mobility loss, and other debilities leading to early death to be just some of the consequences of this work.

Hua and Ray place driving for ride-hail companies together with the longer history of taxi driving to show how driving work channels the liveliness and vitality of drivers into corporate profits, leaving the drivers themselves exposed to physical and emotional dangers, as well as debilitating medical conditions. As they state directly, “The conditions of driving for Uber and taxi companies allow the flourishing of the lives of passengers (and corporate interests) at the expense of the life chances of the workers” (42). The exploitation of drivers is underpinned by “racial power,” which “more than racial identity alone, underlies (racial) capitalism’s designation of “investable lives” (13). In this way, they give us an understanding of the so-called sharing economy as another form of diminishing some lives to promote thriving for others that was behind European territorial colonialism and contemporary geographies of resource depletion for the benefit of geographic and demographic zones of enrichment.3

By centering the longer history of taxi-driver organizing and worker conditions as the precedent for ride-hail app driving work, Hua and Ray’s analysis contributes a deeper understanding of how the historical shift to ride-app work is a particularly illustrative example of how casualization is breaking apart the history of entitlements won by labor organizing. There has been substantial scholarly interest in the novelties of the gig economy. Algorithmic management, casualization and crowdsourcing, the sharing economy—these terms mark new technologies and structures of work in labor studies, as well as in media and information studies. Spent behind the Wheel instead carefully shows how Lyft and Uber market themselves in San Francisco and New York City as technology companies rather than taxi companies (37). Resisting their marketing of novelty, the authors show that the focus on new technology is a tactic for corporations to avoid local regulations established through union organizing to protect drivers and passengers, thereby increasing profits and flexibility for employers.

What is the remedy for the false separation of passengers and drivers as political subjects and the industry’s argument that ride-hail companies are technology entities and not taxi-related? Hua and Ray compel us to see that driving is interdependent with other forms of intimate service work and is in fact an example of the gigging of social relations more generally (5). The distinctions are important, but to counter the artificial separations between domestic, household, and attendant/service work, the authors argue that driving work must be seen as part of a larger landscape of social reproduction (128). This observation articulates well with the work of Silvia Federici, feminist materialist and activist, who extends the well-established Marxist analysis of how capitalism grows by capturing more and more of the social collective’s shared wealth. She argues that the commons has always been imagined to include women’s bodies and subjectivities and that enclosure and exploitation of women’s bodies to harness and control reproductive capacity continues today.4

This helps us understand why industries like commercial surrogacy, porn work, or even platform-based freelance and fiction writing can be continuous with the racial and gendered logics of capitalist accumulation.5 Hua and Ray expand this approach, considering reproduction through drivers’ equipment, “such as top-of-the-line dash cams, discreet personal cans of pepper spray, cheerful t-shirts that read ‘tips appreciated,’ and heavy-duty emesis bags with which gig drivers are encouraged to outfit their cars.” These items denote not only the capture of their lives and private space for corporate profit but also the hidden stake of professional driving, the uncompensated work of “self-defense, careful supplemental labor, and attendance” (120).

Uber and Lyft have been the target of class-action suits by passengers whose mobility was not accommodated by ride-hail app drivers, because of the lack of regulation achieved by their presentation as technology companies (for comparison, the authors track accommodations made in the taxi industry). Hua and Ray argue that passengers and drivers, and even those who do not use ride-hail apps, are complicit in the injustice of leaving some people to live lives diminished by confinement. Unaccommodated passengers and exploited and isolated drivers are failed by those of us who fail to act on the material fact of interdependency denied by the “gigging of social relations,” whether or not we even use these apps. The final chapter raises a potential new horizon for organizing for driving work protections and regulations. The authors consider the question of who does and does not receive accommodation as a disability justice issue that unites drivers and passengers materially, if not yet politically. For example, they look at protests by disability justice activists and taxi and limo drivers that demonstrate their interdependency. They pick up this interdependency as describing a “politics of liveliness” (96).

As someone influenced by feminist scholarship in the Marxist, women of color, postcolonial, and Black feminist traditions, I see Spent behind the Wheel as part of a continuing effort to seek ways to give justice to forms of protest and resistance to capitalist exploitation that show up in local and context-specific iterations. As J. K. Gibson-Graham explains, we can think about multiple local movements and political orientations together as a “movement of movements.”6 For example, are there ways to think about confinement for drivers, already a materially different condition from confinement resulting from blocked mobility for passengers with wheelchairs or other devices, as interdependent with prison abolition or other social justice efforts to end confinement? How can a politics of liveliness work alongside more established forms of organizing and empowerment, like the New York Taxi Workers Alliance?

One of the conclusions of Spent behind the Wheel is that we can follow disability justice advocates and class-action frameworks to understand the interdependence of people separated into passengers and drivers by corporate interests. Despite its history of anti-private-property politics, “the commons” now participates in the problems of the sharing economy discourse. What obstacles are posed to acting on interdependency by the appropriation and redefinition of concepts like the commons, sharing, and protest by app-based practices? Is there any way to continue working with conceptions of the commons in a politics that starts from interdependency as illustrated by Hua and Ray’s analysis of these local movements and lawsuits?

Author Profile

Kalindi Vora is a professor of ethnicity, race, and migration; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; history of science and medicine; and American studies at Yale University. They are the author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015) and Reimagining Reproduction: Essays on Surrogacy, Labor, and Technologies of Human Reproduction (2022) and the coauthor of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019). With the Precarity Lab, she is an author of Technoprecarious (2020).