research-article

Designing for Labour: Uber and the On-Demand Mobile Workforce

Authors:

Mareike Glöss,

Moira McGregor,

Barry BrownAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 1632 - 1643

https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858476

Published: 07 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Apps allowing passengers to hail and pay for taxi service on their phone? such as Uber and Lyft-have affected the livelihood of thousands of workers worldwide. In this paper we draw on interviews with traditional taxi drivers, rideshare drivers and passengers in London and San Francisco to understand how "ride-sharing" transforms the taxi business. With Uber, the app not only manages the allocation of work, but is directly involved in "labour issues": changing the labour conditions of the work itself. We document how Uber driving demands new skills such as emotional labour, while increasing worker flexibility. We discuss how the design of new technology is also about creating new labour opportunities -- jobs -- and how we might think about our responsibilities in designing these labour relations.

References

[1]

Philippe Aigrain. (2012) Sharing: culture and the economy in the internet age. Amsterdam University Press.

[2]

Donald N Anderson. (2014) "Not just a taxi"? Forprofit ridesharing, driver strategies, and VMT. Transportation, 41 (5). 1099--1117.

[3]

Orley Ashenfelter and David Card. (2010) HANDBOOK OF LABOR ECONOMICS, VOL 4A. Elsevier.

[4]

Steven Barley and Gideon Kunda. (2001) Bringing work back in. Organisational Science, 12 (1). 76--95.

Digital Library

[5]

Ian Beetlestone. (2014) Why London's black cab drivers are protesting over Uber: As taxi drivers, we have to drive through hoops to get licensed -- minicab app Uber should not be given a free ride Guardian.

[6]

Russell Belk. (2014) You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online. Journal of Business Research, 67 (8). 1595--1600.

[7]

Victoria Bellotti, Alexander Ambard, Daniel Turner, Christina Gossmann, Kamila Demkova and John M. Carroll. (2015) A Muddle of Models of Motivation for Using Peer-to-Peer Economy Systems Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, Seoul, South Korea, 1085--1094.

Digital Library

[8]

Margot Brereton and Sunil Ghelawat. (2010) Designing for participation in local social ridesharing networks: grass roots prototyping of IT systems Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, ACM, Sydney, Australia, 199202.

Digital Library

[9]

Joshua Brustein. (2012) The push to make cab rides smarter The NY Times, NY.

[10]

Susie Cagle. (2014) The case against sharing. The medium, https://thenib.com/the-case-against-sharing9ea5ba3d216d.

[11]

Clayton Christensen. (2005) Disruptive Innovation. in Soegaard, M. and Dam, R.F. eds. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed, The Interaction Design Foundation., Aarhus, Denmark.

[12]

James Cooper, Ray Mundy and John Nelson. (2010) Taxi!: urban economies and the social and transport impacts of the taxicab. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

[13]

Fred Davis. (1959) The Cabdriver and His Fare: Facets of a Fleeting Relationship. American Journal of Sociology, 65. 158--165.

[14]

Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood. (2010) Organising SelfReferential Taxi Work with mICT: The case of the London Black Cab Drivers. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing.

[15]

FDIC. (2013) 2013 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households.

[16]

Lisa Fleisher. (2014) Thousands of European Cab Drivers Protest Uber, Taxi Apps: Protesters in London, Madrid, Milan Say the Apps Skirt Regulations Wall Street Journal, NY.

[17]

Christian Fuchs. (2010) Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society, 26 (3). 179--196.

Digital Library

[18]

Diego Gambetta and Heather Hamill. (2005) Streetwise: How Taxi Drivers Establish Customer's Trustworthiness. Russell Sage Foundation.

[19]

Joan Greenbaum. (1996) Back to Labor: Returning to labor process discussions in the study of work. in Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM, 229237.

Digital Library

[20]

Alison Griswold. (2014) Increasingly Desperate Lyft Accuses Rival Uber of Dirty Business Tactics Slate.com.

[21]

Jonathan V Hall and Alan B Krueger. (2015) An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber's DriverPartners in the USA, Princeton University Industrial Relations Section: Working papers.

[22]

Dan Hara. (2011) Taxicab Regulations and Taxi Driver Income: Report prepared for the Taxicab Inquiry of Victoria, Australia. Incorporated, H.A.a. ed., Ottawa.

[23]

John Harvey, David Golightly and Andrew Smith. (2014) HCI as a means to prosociality in the economy. in Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, 2955--2964.

Digital Library

[24]

Alison Hearn. (2010) Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital "reputation-economy. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 10. 421--438.

[25]

James J Heckman, Robert J LaLonde and Jeffrey A Smith. (1999) The economics and econometrics of active labor market programs. Handbook of labor economics, 3. 1865--2097.

[26]

Anthony Hey and Anne Trefethen. (2003) The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective. in Hey, G.F.a.T. ed. Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a reality, John Wiley & Sons Ltd 809--824.

[27]

Harry Hochheiser and Jonathan Lazar. (2007) HCI and societal issues: A framework for engagement. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 23 (3). 339--374.

[28]

Arlie Russell Hochschild. (2003) The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling, With a new afterword. Univ of California Press.

[29]

Graham Russell Gao Hodges. (2009) Taxi!: a social history of the NY City cabdriver. JHU Press.

[30]

Tapio Ikkala and Airi Lampinen. (2015) Monetizing network hospitality: Hospitality and sociability in the context of AirBnB Proceedings of CSCW 2015, ACM Press.

Digital Library

[31]

Lilly Irani. (2015) Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114 (1). 225--234.

[32]

Jofish Kaye, Janet Vertesi, Jennifer Ferreira, Barry Brown and Mark Perry. (2014) # CHImoney: financial interactions, digital cash, capital exchange and mobile money. in CHI'14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 111114.

Digital Library

[33]

Aniket Kittur, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matt Lease and John Horton. (2013) The future of crowd work. in Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), ACM, 1301--1318.

Digital Library

[34]

Min Kyung Lee, Daniel Kusbit, Evan Metsky and Laura Dabbish. (2015) Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers. in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1603--1612.

Digital Library

[35]

Douglas MacMillan. (2015) Uber touts its employment opportunities The Wall Street Journal, NY.

[36]

Mark Maguire and Fiona Murphy. (2013) Neoliberalism, securitization and racialization in the Irish taxi industry. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 1367549413508751.

[37]

Adrian T Moore and Ted Balaker. (2006) Do economists reach a conclusion on taxi de-regulation" Econ Journal Watch, 3 (1). 109--132.

[38]

Fabian Muniesa, Yuval Millo and Michel Callon. (2007) An introduction to market devices. The sociological review, 55 (s2). 1--12.

[39]

Vivi Bach Pedersen and Suzan Lewis. (2012) Flexible friends' Flexible working time arrangements, blurred work-life boundaries and friendship. Work, Employment & Society, 26 (3). 464480.

[40]

John Pencavel. (1986) Labor supply of men: a survey. Handbook of labor economics, 1 (Part 1). 3102.

[41]

Gary Pritchard, John Vines, Pam Briggs, Lisa Thomas and Patrick Olivier. (2014) Digitally driven: how location based services impact the work practices of London bus drivers. in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 3617--3626.

Digital Library

[42]

Gary W Pritchard, Pam Briggs, John Vines and Patrick Olivier. (2015) How to Drive a London Bus: Measuring Performance in a Mobile and Remote Workplace. in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1885--1894.

Digital Library

[43]

Lisa Rayle, Susan Shaheen, Nelson Chan, Danielle Dai and Robert Cervero. (2014) App-Based, OnDemand Ride Services: Comparing Taxi and Ridesourcing Trips and User Characteristics in San Francisco. University of California, Berkeley.

[44]

Brishen Rogers. (2015) Social Costs of Uber, The. U. Chi. L. Rev. Dialogue, 82. 85.

[45]

Trebor Scholz (ed.), 2012,^(eds.). Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory. Routledge.

Digital Library

[46]

Sarah Sharma. (2014) In the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press.

[47]

Yossi Sheffi. (2014) A Failure to Treat Workers with Respect Could Be Uber's Achilles? Heel. MIT Technology review (September 22, 2014).

[48]

David K Shipler. (2008) The working poor: Invisible in America. Vintage.

[49]

Rannie Teodoro, Pinar Ozturk, Mor Naaman, Winter Mason and Janne Lindqvist. (2014) The motivations and experiences of the on-demand mobile workforce. in Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, ACM, 236--247.

Digital Library

[50]

Uber. (2015) The Driver Roadmap: Where Uber Driver-Partners Have Been, And Where They're Going. A Uber commission report, Benenson Strategy Group.

[51]

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. (2009) Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Harvard University Press.

[52]

Sherpa Ventures. (2014) 2014 ODE Report: The Ondemand economy, San Francisco.

[53]

Ton Wilthagen and Frank Tros. (2004) The concept of "flexicurity": a new approach to regulating employment and labour markets. Transfer: European Review of labour and research, 10 (2). 166--186.

[54]

Matthew Yglesias. (2013) Cities Should Embrace UberX Rather Than Trying to Come Up With Reasons It's Illegal Slate.com.

Cited By

Gebresselassie M(2025)Labor issues from the perspective of drivers on the Uber and Lyft apps and the impact on riders who use wheelchairsTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2024.10089138(100891)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2024.100891
Remicio-Tovar P(2024)Technology Disruption and Female Labor Force Participation: A Case for UberSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4816717Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4816717
Thuppilikkat ADhar DChandra P(2024)Union Makes Us Strong: Space, Technology, and On-Demand Ridesourcing Digital Labour PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870028:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687002
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Designing for Labour: Uber and the On-Demand Mobile Workforce
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

On Ridesharing Competition and Accessibility: Evidence from Uber, Lyft, and Taxi
WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference

Ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft have become an important part of the Vehicle For Hire (VFH) market, which used to be dominated by taxis. Unfortunately, ridesharing services are not required to share data like taxi services, which has made it ...
Analyzing Uber's Ride-sharing Economy
WWW '17 Companion: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion

Uber is a popular ride-sharing application that matches people who need a ride (or riders) with drivers who are willing to provide it using their personal vehicles. Despite its growing popularity, there exist few studies that examine large-scale Uber ...
Part-Time Ride-Sharing: Recognizing the Context in which Drivers Ride-Share and its Impact on Platform Use
GROUP

Ride-sharing companies have been reshaping the structure and practice of ride-hailing work. At the same time, studies have been showing mixed driver experiences on the platform while many of the drivers are working part-time. In this research, we seek to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2016

6108 pages

ISBN:9781450333627

DOI:10.1145/2858036

General Chairs:
Jofish Kaye
Yahoo
,
Allison Druin
University of Maryland / National Park Service
,
Program Chairs:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan
,
Dan Morris
Microsoft
,
Juan Pablo Hourcade
University of Iowa

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 May 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI'16

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI'16: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 7 - 12, 2016

California, San Jose, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHI '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 565 of 2,435 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

149
Total Citations
View Citations
3,838
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)320
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)31

Reflects downloads up to 30 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gebresselassie M(2025)Labor issues from the perspective of drivers on the Uber and Lyft apps and the impact on riders who use wheelchairsTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2024.10089138(100891)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2024.100891
Remicio-Tovar P(2024)Technology Disruption and Female Labor Force Participation: A Case for UberSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4816717Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4816717
Thuppilikkat ADhar DChandra P(2024)Union Makes Us Strong: Space, Technology, and On-Demand Ridesourcing Digital Labour PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870028:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687002
Jaimes Rodriguez IPetterson ADoggett OChandra P(2024)El costo de la independencia: Latino house-cleaners in Technology-Mediated Labour MarketsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869998:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686999
Ma S(2024)Advancing HCI and Design Methods to Empower Gig WorkersCompanion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3665123(37-40)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656156.3665123
Ma SZimmerman JFox SNisi VNunes N(2024)"My Sense of Morality Leads to My Suffering, Battling, and Arguing": The Role of Platform Designers in (Un)Deciding Gig Worker IssuesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660713(3501-3514)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3660713
Gupta MKarnatak NJain M(2024)Understanding the Technology-Mediated Home Phlebotomy Ecosystem in IndiaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374218:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637421
Woodruff AShelby RKelley PRousso-Schindler SSmith-Loud JWilcox L(2024)How Knowledge Workers Think Generative AI Will (Not) Transform Their IndustriesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642700(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642700
Chong AYoo JCheshire C(2024)Perceptions of Fairness in Technology-Mediated MarketplacesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642678(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642678
Petterson AJaimes Rodriguez IDoggett OChandra P(2024)Networks of care in digital domestic labour economiesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642200(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642200
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents