Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times

Side Hustle Safety Net

Side Hustle Safety Net

HOW VULNERABLE WORKERS SURVIVE PRECARIOUS TIMES

Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (NSF grant 2029924). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Portions of chapter 2 have been reproduced, with permission, from Ravenelle, Alexandrea J., Ken Cai Kowalski, and Erica C. Janko. 2021. The Side Hustle Safety Net: Precarious Workers and Gig Work during COVID-19. Sociological Perspectives 64, no. 5: 898–919.

Portions of chapter 3 have been reproduced, with permission, from Ravenelle, Alexandrea J., Erica C. Janko, and Ken Cai Kowalski. 2022. Good Jobs, Scam Jobs: Detecting, Normalizing, and Internalizing Online Job Scams during the COVID-19 Pandemic. New Media and Society 24, no. 7: 1591–1610.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ravenelle, Alexandrea J., author.

Title: Side hustle safety net : how vulnerable workers survive precarious times / Alexandrea J. Ravenelle.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023009337 | ISBN 9780520387294 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520387300 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520387317 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Precarious employment—United States. | Gig economy—United States. | Underemployment—Economic aspects—United States. | COVID-19 (Disease)—Economic aspects—United States. | Independent contractors—United States.

Classification: LCC HD5858.U6 R38 2023 | DDC 331.25/7290973—dc23/eng/20230616

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009337

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Jacob

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1 Officially Unemployed or Forgotten Jobless?

2 The Side Hustle Safety Net

3 Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Scam Jobs

4 Making More and Moving On Up

5 Strategies of Survival

6 Stuck in Place

7 It’s a Beautiful Life

8 Learning from Covid

Appendix: Research Methodology

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Map of unemployment uptake

2. Respondent education levels by worker classification, Phase I (n = 199)

3. Respondent income levels by worker classification, Phase I (n = 199)

4. Respondent self-identified race and ethnicity by worker classification, Phase I (n = 199)

5. Covid dining sheds photo 1

6. Covid dining sheds photo 2

TABLES

1. Platform participation and work categorization of respondents, Phase I (n = 199)

2. Platform participation and work categorization of respondents, Phase II (n = 168)

3. CARES Act unemployment assistance programs

BOX

1. Sample Craigslist advertisement to recruit research participants

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I am indebted to the more than two hundred workers who gave their time and energy to this project, especially during the early months of the pandemic, when everything was unknown and even breathing the air was scary. This book wouldn’t have happened without your participation. I hope I did your stories justice.

This project would have been impossible without funding from the National Science Foundation. Julie Schor has been an invaluable mentor over the years, supporting my dissertation, introducing me to fellow contacts, and providing crucial advice at every turn. She also told me about the NSF RAPID grant program in early April 2020. I will forever appreciate the guidance and patience provided by Toby Parcel, Joe Whitmeyer, and Melanie Hughes at NSF. This research also benefited from a UNC Junior Faculty Development Grant, a New Faculty Collaboration Grant from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and a Publication Support Grant from the UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities and Office of Research Development.

Ken Cai Kowalski and Erica Janko were incredibly dedicated graduate students who pandemic-pivoted to interviewing dozens of precarious and unemployed workers. I truly could not have done this project without the two of them. Additionally, Savannah (Newton) Knoble and Dawn Culton spent hours on coding and summaries, and were crucial sounding boards.

Naomi Schneider saw the early promise in this book and fast-tracked its contract. Thank you for taking a chance on me when I was a PhD student and moving this book forward. I love working together. Editorial assistant Aline Dolinh remained unfailingly patient. P. J. Heim provided another fantastic index, while Elisabeth Magnus, my copyeditor, gives new meaning to grace.

The Sociology Department at UNC has been an unfailing source of support and mentorship. I was in my first-year review with my chair Kenneth Andy Andrews, via Zoom, when I received my NSF grant, and Andy’s reaction will forever remain one of my favorite academic memories. Howard Aldrich has been a patient mentor and provided valuable feedback on an early version of chapter 1, while Karolyn Tyson, Lisa Pearce, Barbara Entwisle, and Jackie Hagan have encouraged me to keep writing. I feel exceptionally fortunate to be a part of a tenure-track cohort with Jessica Su and Tania Jenkins, and later Scott Duxbury and Shannon Malone Gonzalez, with informal mentoring provided by Kate Weisshaar and Taylor Hargrove. Yong Cai, Guang Guo, and Neal Caren have always been patient with my new-faculty questions. I’ve always appreciated the messages of support from Ken Bollen, Kathleen Fitzgerald, Karen Guzzo, Bob Hummer, Charlie Kurzman, and Ted Mouw. I will forever be thankful to Arne Kalleberg for his Come work with me tweet that led me to apply to the department, and his subsequent mentoring.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has been incredibly generous and understanding. They funded the work that made Hustle and Gig possible and were flexible with the deadlines for my work on elite gig workers. Derek Ozkal is the perfect program officer—encouraging, funny, and quick to recommend additional connections. Thank you for your support over the years.

My accountability partner, Calvin John Smiley, has been an indispensable source of support and encouragement. The weekly fear of admitting to a productivity lapse drives me to my computer most weekday mornings.

Writing a first postdissertation book felt like transitioning from training wheels to a ten-speed. My doctoral adviser, Barbara Katz Rothman, went above and beyond, sitting down with me for a long breakfast when I was four chapters in and worried about where I was going. You are the epitome of mentoring midwifery, and always know when to say There, there.

Although I’ve never met her, Sarah Damaske’s book has greatly informed my own and was its own form of encouragement when I was struggling to get started. Dave Brady took me under his wing when I was a new assistant professor teaching 4-4, taught me how to write a journal article, and provided invaluable feedback on this manuscript. Christine Williams also provided crucial feedback and suggestions on the manuscript; I hope I’ve done them justice.

Jonathan Davis, Colin Jerolmack, Jeff Manza, Joan Maya Mazelis, Christine Schwartz, Jennifer Silva, and Kate Zaloom have also provided informal one-off mentoring just when I needed it most.

Joel Rosner, Dena Sloan, Isaiah Akin, and Digs Majumder are the best friends in the world. Eva and Virgil Duncan and Diane Lefebvre and Ron Szabo have spent hours with our children and given us much-needed breaks over the last few years, while my mother and sister have cheered us on from afar. Thank you for everything.

My husband, Sam Duncan, makes our world go round. He cooks, drives, manages bath time and bedtime, and is remarkably supportive of my career. I don’t have words for how much I appreciate everything he does. I couldn’t do any of this without him. My daughter, Anna, was just two when the first box of mama books (aka Hustle and Gig) arrived. She was the perfect dissertation baby and is now the official family artist. I love you both.

Finally, this book is dedicated to Jacob Douglas, my tenure-track baby, born during the release of Hustle and Gig and in the middle of my interviews to join the UNC Sociology Department. There’s nothing quite like a squeezy hug from a toddler after a long day of writing. I love you and our story time. May you always achieve your dreams.

1

Officially Unemployed or Forgotten Jobless?

In early 2020, Abdul, a twenty-seven-year-old Middle Eastern American, was working several jobs: restaurant and bar server, videographer, and light catering on the side.* But then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Bars were considered nonessential. Restaurants could stay open for takeout but were prevented from offering on-site dining, rendering their servers redundant.

I worked in two different places and . . . they basically fired everyone. They never promised us our jobs back after this was done, he said. They just basically said, ‘We can’t afford to have you guys on the payroll. . . . ’ One place that I worked at, they only kept two of the kitchen staff, only two.

Abdul applied for unemployment assistance, but he’d spent part of the previous year working in Florida and hadn’t worked long enough to qualify for New York State unemployment benefits. I was working on tips, so the money that I was making on the books wasn’t enough, he said. Even if I did qualify for unemployment, I would’ve gotten change, literally change. He tried to apply for unemployment assistance from Florida, explaining, That didn’t work either, because they’re like, ‘Oh, you can’t go onto unemployment with Florida if you live in New York. You’re not a resident.’ It’s bullshit.

Abdul was a member of the forgotten jobless, left outside the unemployment assistance safety net during a generation-defining pandemic. It didn’t take long for him to run out of money.

In his first interview in May 2020, Abdul described himself as super frustrated . . . just anxious all the time and it’s not fun. It’s a scary fucking situation, he said. Like you might wake up one day and not have any money for food or hygiene products. I haven’t shaved in weeks. I shave my face. I can’t even afford to get a razor.

Abdul had done side hustle work on food delivery apps before the pandemic, and as his finances deteriorated, he decided to do food delivery work full-time. I had no other choice but to find something, some sort of income, he said. I ran out of money.

But Abdul wasn’t the only person who viewed side hustle work as an economic safety net, and competition for food delivery work was fierce. On one app, workers had to claim delivery slots, in thirty-minute increments, in advance. Sometimes you go on and you only see from 11:00 to 11:30. . . . You can claim that slot, but then the next opening is from 4:00 to 4:30, from 4:30 to 5:00, he said. You can spend a whole day trying to work and end up working only two hours. . . . Even when you work a few hours, you’re not guaranteed deliveries back to back. So you can get a delivery, do the pickup, drop-off, and then end up waiting, wasting the rest of that hour, just waiting for another order.

With platform-based gig work so unreliable, Abdul also started picking up moving gigs via Craigslist, work that he described as horrible. Instead of being direct hires by the resident, most of the positions were posted by outsourcing middlemen.

They claim that they have a crew and a truck, and then they go rent a truck like a U-Haul or something, and then they, again, hire a couple people like myself, they pay us less than what we would make if we were dealing directly with the person that was offering the job, he said. The pay is horrible. They don’t provide any safety equipment. They don’t even provide sanitizer, you have to get your own mask, you have to get your own gloves. They have no insurance, so if anything breaks, anything goes wrong, you’re responsible for that, you know? . . . So if you work all day and one thing gets broken, it’s coming out of all of our money.

The first time he had to pay for a moving mistake, one of his fellow workers had thrown a storage ottoman in the moving truck, not realizing that it held picture frames. The frames inside broke, and the replacement cost was split among the four workers: $20 each.

The second time was a big statue, Abdul said, noting that a teenage colleague without moving experience had leaned on the statue, breaking it. It was super expensive. . . . I was supposed to make about $80 plus tips. None of us got paid. That was crazy. Even though it was only a couple of hours, it was just so unfair.

But given the choice between working or waiting for work, Abdul thought the off-platform moving gigs were preferable. Even though it’s risky, at least you know that you’re going to go do this job for a couple of hours and get that much money, he said, noting that food delivery work with DoorDash and Uber Eats wasn’t guaranteed.

It’s not steady. It’s not a steady income. You can’t count on it. If you have to pay a certain amount of money for rent every month, you’re never really confident, you’re never really sure you’re going to be able to make rent. . . . Something like Uber, you’re driving, you’re using your personal car; if you really think about it, the money that you’re making is not enough. You’re putting the wear and tear on your car, the tickets, and the parking violations. If you’re doing Uber Eats, you have to go in and out of restaurants and buildings. All that stuff costs a lot more than what you’re making. . . . So you’re basically just trying to make enough money to survive today and you’re basically just fucking over your future self. . . . It’s like you’re borrowing. . . . You’re not earning that money. You’re borrowing it from your future self.

Abdul tried looking for a stable job, even walking his neighborhood with a handful of résumés. But at numerous businesses he was told that there were dozens of applications ahead of his. One job he applied for, he didn’t hear back for a year; it took that long for the manager to work through all of the other applications. He heard of someone who was helping people to get unemployment assistance in exchange for a cut of their benefits, but he was worried about the legal implications, describing it as pretty sketchy.

I knew that I deserved some kind of unemployment. I paid taxes. I bust my ass, and I work so hard. I had to work really shitty jobs, he said. I remember when I was a teenager, I was thinking to myself, ‘This is crazy. A third of my paycheck is just disappearing. I’m paying a third of my paycheck as taxes. But then, if I lose my job tomorrow, I don’t get any kind of help?’ And I was thinking about that when I was like eighteen.

More than a year into the pandemic, Abdul had resigned himself to the lack of help. So I just came to a place in my life. I just accept it now. I accept that the country that I live in, the place that I live in, is a little bit fucked up, and I have to take it for the good and the bad, he said. If something happens, I just have to work a little bit harder, maybe suffer a little bit more, but I’m going to make it through.

Andrew, a twenty-seven-year-old white man, was less than a week into his dream job when he was laid off. After more than a year as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, Andrew had spent several months working as an au pair for a local family as he tried to decide what he wanted to do with his life.

It’s always been a dream of mine to work in the food industry, and I finally made the decision that I wanted to get professional training working in a restaurant, he said. It took more than a month, but he was eventually able to convince a local high-end restaurant to let him trail, or work shifts in the kitchen as part of an audition process. I spent four days working in the kitchen, and on Friday afternoon, Chef came in and said they were closing, but I think the day before I had actually gotten on the books, he said. As crazy as it was, if I hadn’t been so aggressive about trying to get this job I would be in a completely different situation right now.

Even though he hadn’t been working for at least ninety days, because he was on the books and had lost his job through a Corona-related event, he was able to qualify for unemployment assistance. It didn’t hurt either that the CEO of the restaurant group that he was working for pledged to pay workers for an additional week after the restaurant closed, and later started an employee relief fund.

In his week on the books at the restaurant, he had earned minimum wage for thirty-five hours, or about $500. When I interviewed him for the first time in early June 2020, Andrew was still receiving partial unemployment of almost $900 a week, had taken a part-time job as a cheesemonger at a local farmers market, and was helping friends with a small food start-up.

It’s weird. Things work out like this in my life. I don’t know. I think people have said it’s just the way you see it. If you look at things a certain way, things tend to just kind of flow. Yeah, so actually starting in April really I was working probably more, making more money than I would be at the restaurant and both in food-related jobs, he said. I’ve been able to establish a little nest egg again and emergency fund, and actually today I put down a deposit for a new sublet, so I’m going to move next week into my own apartment. . . . I feel kind of safe that I’ll definitely be able to pay rent.

When I interviewed him again in the spring of 2021, Andrew had recently been hired back by the restaurant for several months, leaving behind the cheesemonger job. The restaurant wasn’t fully open, and he was primarily making meals for needy families, but it meant the opportunity to cook, and the job offered benefits. But he was uncertain about when the restaurant would reopen fully, and his friends at the food start-up were looking to hire, so he quit the restaurant.

They’ve just been experiencing pretty robust growth, and they were in a position to offer me a full-time role, he said. It’s nice to be in a salaried role actually. . . . I think at the moment of getting this opportunity, it seemed like more of a long-term stable kind of career trajectory.

The Focus of This Book

Both Andrew and Abdul lost jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. But while Andrew was officially unemployed and qualified for unemployment benefits, including the additional $600 a week of Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), Abdul was part of the forgotten jobless. Left to fend for himself, Abdul turned to the side hustle safety net of gig work. While his vow to make it through is admirable, the inequity between their situations is jarring.

This is the story of what happens to the most precarious workers—the gig workers and laid-off restaurant staff, the early-career creatives, and the minimum-wage employees—when the economy suddenly collapses, and how they fare in the long pursuit of an economic recovery.

In this book I ask, how does obtaining the status of being officially unemployed or being part of the forgotten jobless affect workers? How do officially unemployed workers make sense of receiving more on unemployment than they were making while working? For those who kept working, how do they feel about their minimum-wage paycheck and increased risk of exposure to the virus, compared to peers who were paid to stay home? How do workers reconcile the contradiction between the amount of money spent during Covid and a failure to protect the vulnerable? And finally, how do larger social trends, such as the internalization of risk and the rise of polyemployment, or working two or more jobs, affect precarious workers during these unsettled times? ¹

The Importance of Unemployment Assistance and Polyemployment

Why does it matter if people are officially unemployed and receiving benefits? Anyone who has ever received unemployment will be quick to note that it’s typically not very much money, generally enough to cover one’s food, transportation, and utilities but not necessarily rent or a mortgage. Or, if it’s enough to cover the rent, it’s not also enough to pay for food and other living expenses. Receiving unemployment benefits may keep an unemployed professional from emptying their rainy day fund, but it won’t necessarily prevent them from tapping their savings.

But unemployment assistance is more than micro-level payments to individuals. Unemployment benefits have a macro benefit as an automatic stabilizer, a mechanism that can help to maintain spending during an economic slowdown. For better or worse, our economy is based on consumer spending: the purchases you make help to keep other people employed. Too many unemployed workers pulling back on their spending can have reverberations throughout the economy, triggering a recession. As chapter 2 shows, with a brief history of the Great Depression and the creation of state unemployment programs, these stabilizers are an important strategy to ensure that an economic downturn doesn’t quickly spiral out of control. If too many workers lose their jobs—and don’t have access to unemployment benefits—the recessionary impact can be considerable.

Much like workers’ compensation and Social Security contributions, unemployment insurance is a hard-won protection that has required generations of effort to secure. And just as gig economy companies are effectively rolling back generations of hard-won workplace protections, business strategies that classify workers as independent contractors, or pay them in cash under the table, also roll back access to the social safety net of unemployment assistance.

But it’s important to realize that not all of the rolling back of protections is due to company strategies. In recent years, more and more workers have begun engaging in polyemployment. ² Polyemployment includes having a main job and a side hustle, but it also encompasses working two or more part-time jobs. Polyemployment is often a response to underemployment, such as involuntary part-time work, but it’s also a response to wage stagnation and can be used to enable the pursuit of passion jobs like creative work. Polyemployment is an example of the internalization of risk, when workers assume personal responsibility for the physical and financial market risks shifted onto them from corporations in a risk society. ³ Facing stagnating wages and the increasing risk of unemployment, workers rely on a side hustle safety net of multiple income sources to create a semblance of job security and income stability for themselves. The goal of the side hustle safety net is to reduce the risk of putting all their eggs in one basket, to quote one respondent.

Polyemployment can sometimes help workers when they suddenly discover that one of their previous jobs qualifies them for unemployment. But it can also backfire. State unemployment offices don’t generally recognize the financial impact of losing multiple jobs simultaneously, and the presence of a secondary job reduces the amount of unemployment assistance that someone receives. This is the polyemployment paradox, whereby efforts to create income security and a personal safety net can leave workers even more precarious.

As Abdul’s experience demonstrates, officially unemployed is a status that isn’t available to everyone. It’s an achieved status, ⁴ or one that is earned, and that is available only to people who lose their jobs through no fault of their own, through layoffs or company closings; who worked at a job for a sufficient amount of time and who earned above a certain level of income; and who were classified as W-2 employees as opposed to independent contractors. It’s limited to people who are actively seeking work and available to take a job if offered. And historically, this status was an option only for workers in specific approved occupations.

As a result, Unemployment with a capital U, the status of being officially unemployed—collecting unemployment benefits or being eligible for them—doesn’t begin to capture the full range of working and being out of work. A jobless worker might be unemployed but ineligible for unemployment benefits because the type of job they were working previously (1099 as opposed to W-2) didn’t qualify, because they didn’t work the previous job long enough, because they weren’t paid enough to qualify for benefits, or because they quit instead of being laid off. ⁵ Or they might simply be the nonworking unemployed, like recent graduates, returning homemakers, or people transitioning off disability, who don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. They may be the partially unemployed, workers who face a reduction in hours or who lost a full-time unemployment-qualifying job but who keep a part-time side hustle that may reduce or disqualify them from unemployment benefits. Or they may be underemployed, working fewer hours than they want at a job, or working at a job that isn’t in line with their skills or earning potential. ⁶ All of these categories signify people who are not making a living wage at a single job and have not recently done so. Some of these individuals are down and out, but some are also making do or getting by, and some are hustling with multiple jobs.

Officially Unemployed Is an Achieved Status

It feels odd to think about officially unemployed as a status. When we hear the term status, we often think of prestige. The president has more status than their assistant. A doctor is considered to be higher status than a garbage collector. But status is not just about prestige. Status is the position someone occupies in the larger society. ⁷ And that status sets limits on our behavior and provides access to privileges. A young child is usually free of the responsibility to pay rent, buy groceries, or keep up with car repairs; at the same time, they also don’t get to pick their bedtime or eat candy for dinner. Being an adult means getting to pick your own bedtime, a privilege that may be overshadowed by the need to work late to finish a project.

Unemployment is typically stigmatized: unemployed professionals may describe themselves as freelancing, consulting, or being between jobs, all descriptions that suggest an ongoing commitment to work. During the pandemic, that stigma didn’t entirely lift, but with so many workers also unemployed, the status of unemployed was less stigmatized. As thirty-five-year-old Ethan, a white unemployed comedic actor, explained, I try to remember that it’s not like I’m here at my mom’s house because I bottomed out and I couldn’t get any work anymore and I suck. It’s because they shut down the entertainment industry.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman writes, Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way. ⁸ Someone who is officially unemployed is generally considered to be deserving of weekly payments from their state government for twenty-six weeks, or approximately six months, and often more during an economic downturn. During the Great Recession, the 99ers were a group of people who received ninety-nine weeks of unemployment assistance—almost two years—before they exhausted their benefits. Workers who are officially unemployed are eligible to defer their federal student loans. Officially unemployed workers may be able to more easily qualify for Medicaid, or health insurance marketplace subsidies, or hardship repayment programs from their credit cards.

During the early months of the pandemic, people with the status of officially unemployed were seen as deserving of financial help that was also intended to keep them—and their families—safe from the virus. The additional $600 a week FPUC funds were intended to reduce the impact of unemployment on workers, to encourage people to stay home, and to flatten the curve of infection. The forgotten jobless were left to find food delivery jobs in the gig economy or in public-facing essential businesses like grocery stores.

The divide between the forgotten jobless and the officially unemployed isn’t just limited to the pandemic, though. Increasingly, the status of officially unemployed is unattainable for jobless workers. The W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes that the unemployment insurance program has been weakening since the 1980s, serving a smaller percentage of unemployed workers and paying a shrinking percentage of the wages that they have lost. ⁹ In March 2020, before unemployment claims spiked from the pandemic, the Pew Research Center found that only about 29 percent of unemployed Americans were considered officially unemployed and receiving benefits. But even that percentage hides the range of recipiency rates between states, or the percentage of unemployed workers who are receiving unemployment assistance. The Upjohn Institutes notes that while nine states have recipiency rates of greater than 40 percent, twenty-nine have rates of less than 25 percent. North Carolina’s recipiency rate is the lowest in the nation at 10.5 percent. ¹⁰

As the Pew Research Center notes, there are regional patterns to unemployment assistance: southern states have generally lower levels of recipiency, while states in the Northeast or Midwest have higher rates (see figure 1). ¹¹ Even when workers qualify for benefits, there are considerable differences in the maximum weekly benefit amount, with states in the Southeast offering the lowest maximum weekly benefits. It would be easy to say that this is simply a reflection of the cost of living in various states, but it’s hard to argue that the cost of living in Kentucky is more than twice as much as Mississippi, or that the cost of living is higher in Texas than California. Daphne Skandalis and her coauthors note that, prepandemic, systematically stricter rules in states with a larger Black population contributed to an 8 percent Black-white gap in the replacement rate. ¹²

FIGURE 1. Pew Research Center map of unemployment uptake: Being unemployed doesn’t always mean getting unemployment benefits. Share of state’s unemployment workers receiving unemployment benefits, March 2020. NOTE: Rate shown for Puerto Rico is for February 2020. Unemployment data not available for US Virgin Islands. SOURCE: Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Employment and Training Administration, US Labor Department (DeSilver 2020).