![]() ![]() You might be a doer.”įiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the “In Doers We Trust” campaign on its Web site. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. “You follow through on your follow through. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”-as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars-recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. But that Lyft, for some reason, thought that this would reflect kindly on them is perhaps the most horrifying part.” “Maybe she’s an heiress who happens to love the freedom of chauffeuring strangers from place to place on her own schedule. “I can’t pretend to know Mary’s economic situation,” Bryan Menegus at Gizmodo wrote, when the story first appeared. In the other version of Mary’s story, she’s an unprotected worker in precarious circumstances. Perhaps, as Lyft suggests, Mary kept accepting riders while experiencing contractions because “she was still a week away from her due date,” or “she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet.” Or maybe Mary kept accepting riders because the gig economy has further normalized the circumstances in which earning an extra eleven dollars can feel more important than seeking out the urgent medical care that these quasi-employers do not sponsor. (It offers to connect drivers with an insurance broker, and helpfully notes that “the Affordable Care Act offers many choices to make sure you’re covered.”) A third-party platform called SherpaShare, which some drivers use to track their earnings, found, in 2015, that Lyft drivers in Chicago net about eleven dollars per trip. Lyft does not provide its drivers paid maternity leave or health insurance. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit-taking ride requests while she was in labor!-is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication-the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. (She’s wearing a “Little Miss Lyft” onesie.) The post concludes with a call for similar stories: “Do you have an exciting Lyft story you’d love to share? Tweet us your story at story looks different to different people. She gave birth to a daughter, whose picture appears in the post. After completing it, Mary went to the hospital, where she was informed that she was in labor. “Luckily,” as Lyft put it, the passenger requested a short trip. “Since she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet,” Lyft went on, “she stayed in driver mode, and sure enough-ping!- she received a ride request en route to the hospital.” “Since she was still a week away from her due date,” Lyft wrote, “she assumed they were simply a false alarm and continued driving.” As the contractions continued, Mary decided to drive to the hospital. Mary, who was driving in Chicago, picked up a few riders, and then started having contractions. “About a week away from her due date, Mary decided to drive for a few hours after a day of mentoring.” You can guess what happened next. “Long-time Lyft driver and mentor, Mary, was nine months pregnant when she picked up a passenger the night of July 21st,” the post began. Last September, a very twenty-first-century type of story appeared on the company blog of the ride-sharing app Lyft. Jia Tolentino, The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death, The New Yorker (March 22, 2017) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |