Authors’ Response

Spent behind the Wheel: Drivers’ Labor in the Uber Economy is a book about how long-duration driving is structured to expend the vitalities of contemporary professional passenger drivers in the United States across the gigged (which we shorthand as “Uber”) and taxi industries. Driving, we argue, is a form of intimate service work and reproductive labor that extracts the liveliness of drivers for the benefit of the consumers (passengers) of their labor, and is ultimately accumulated as national and corporate wealth, under historical regimes of gender, race, class, nation, work, and ableism. As our archival work and interviews with drivers and organizers show, drivers, like many other predominantly immigrant, low-wage service workers, have been subject to predatory practices not just at work but through ancillary structures such as loan schemes, “poor man’s law,” ideological notions of freedom and private ownership, and criminalization. We understand this treatment to be a consequence of the ways law, labor, and public space have been historically structured in the United States.

Our understanding of drivers’ struggles draws upon the work of a union, the Taxi Workers Alliance, which organizes to combat drivers’ exclusion from public resources. We note the ways that drivers are reflecting upon and challenging their work conditions, particularly the ways their interests are represented as antagonistic to their passengers. We discuss the rejection of these antagonisms by drivers and passengers alike and how instead they hold the taxi and app-hailed transportation companies accountable for their tensions. As we conclude, the celebration of technocapital’s disruptions of traditional markets does not take into account the ways in which its generation of a widespread gig economy has continued to draw upon and maintain a precarious workforce whose vitalities are systematically drained for the immediate benefit of the consumer and the ultimate benefit of capital.

The racial and gender antagonisms that attend reproductive work and that amass as forms of unremunerated labor for the service worker are highlighted by Magally Miranda. Miranda’s own work reveals how domestic workers are expected to produce forms of unpaid affective work that are translated by the consumers of that labor as labors of love, rather than skilled work, all the better to maintain and justify the hierarchies and social awkwardness inherent to outsourced childcare and other forms of paid household work.1 Like the affective labor extracted from domestic workers, Miranda notes, professional drivers are also charged with providing a pleasant experience for passengers, to the extent that their other exertions (such as memory or navigation) are perceived as unskilled labor or, indeed, as no work at all. Miranda juxtaposes these affective demands with the algorithmic and police violence that circumscribe professional driving, thus illuminating the multiple seen and unseen pressures put upon the precarious service worker.2 As we note, the cab or gigged car is a hybrid space that serves as a space of leisure for the passenger and yet is also a workplace for the driver. The safety and comfort of the passenger is supposedly guaranteed by the surveillance devices mandated by transportation companies, but the health of both the passenger and driver is ultimately held to be the responsibility of the driver alone. By narrowing their own accountability to surveillance within the car, transportation companies mask the ways they expose drivers to larger forms of harm (such as poor wages, debility, and debt) and passengers to designed neglect and exclusion (such as the poor provision of accessible vehicles). Instead, the drivers’ affective labor works to hide these larger structural deficits; this labor of comportment and attendance ultimately burnishes the transportation companies’ brand but does not accrue any benefit to the driver (for example, most Uber and Lyft drivers report not receiving any tips for their work).

Rashné limki names this dynamic—in which capital organizes antagonisms through its exclusion of disabled passengers, displaces them into tensions between individual drivers and riders, and then appears to facilitate them through an arsenal of surveillance and other violences—as a form of racial power and exercise of coloniality. Racial power, as we write in the book and as Miranda also notes, structures the grounds and discourses through which lives gain relative value, and coloniality sorts them into populations dedicated to either serve or be served. As Limki notes, valuable lives are lives concerned with acting upon and mastering the self and thus depend on being served by workers whose own vitality is collapsed into their work. Limki’s work on commercial surrogacy draws attention to the ontological priority of difference in creating this arrangement, as she argues: “Rather than being a social artefact that becomes replicated within the context of work, difference is, in fact, fundamental to the unfolding of any and all activity circumscribed as work. . . . The appearance of gender, sexual and racial difference is the condition of possibility for the institution and operation of work qua work.”3 As we write in Spent behind the Wheel, Uber and Lyft have long marketed themselves as creating new work relations or peer communities outside tired labor logics and hierarchies; Limki’s work shows how, in fact, capital depends on pervasive and persistent colonial logics to remain profitable.

Kalindi Vora also emphasizes the ways that digital economies, predicated on the diminishing of some lives to promote the thriving of others, participate in a decidedly colonial logic. While this logic of depletion and enrichment may bring up visions of European territorial colonialism, Vora argues that we can see this in “technoprecarity” as well. As she and her collaborators explain, technoprecarity “is the premature exposure to death and debility that working with or being subjected to digital technologies accelerates. It is the unevenly distributed yet pervasive condition.”4 Given the ubiquitous yet uneven effects of technoprecarity, she tasks us with more deeply considering how the moments of interdependency between driver and passenger we point to in our book (such as in Hua’s interview with the driver Rosie) give shape to a larger politics of shared liveliness. Certainly, alliances with prison abolition, as Vora suggests, or an abolitionist feminism more generally seem immediately appropriate, as carceral capitalism is clearly at work in the different but intertwined immobilities of the driver and passenger who are stripped of other means of transportation but remain stuck with each other. Rather than depend on carceral solutions (for example, the calls for more policing in the wake of the recent release of the Guardian’s Uber files), Black feminists urge us to consider how the historic fungibility of Black women in the U.S. nation-state is at the core of legitimizing containment and incarceration as a rehabilitative device and form of punishment more generally.5 Other abolitionist feminists, such as Mariame Kaba, specifically call for a return to communal organizing, or the commons Vora asks us to reconsider. As Kaba writes, “Being intentionally in relation to one another, a part of a collective, helps to not only imagine new worlds, but also to imagine ourselves differently.”6

Silvia Federici defines the commons as not just a site for redistributing available resources but a place to collectively build access to self-reproduction with tools (such as community gardens) not completely circumscribed by the logic of the market or the state.7 The means to cater to workers’ own reproduction, to recreate the social fabric, is to create forms of solidarity that we saw in the work of the Taxi Workers Alliance and in our conversations with drivers. Communities of resistance can be fortified by working toward a viable minimum wage, mutual aid organizations, health care for all, free public universities, and, as we are honored to do so in the space of this forum, shared knowledges, common interests, and collective struggles.

Author Profiles

Julietta Hua is a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University.

Kasturi Ray is a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University. In addition to her many collaborations with Julietta Hua, she is the author of work on picture brides and other domestic workers. Her teaching and research focus on labor, culture, and race.