BENEATH THE WAGE

Seeing service work as “labor exploitation.”

Eighty percent of Americans today are employed in service jobs, notes McClanahan, a scholar at the University of California, Irvine. Those jobs are in turn divided into professionalized, high-paying occupations and nonprofessional, low-waged ones. McClanahan suggests that the nonprofessional jobs, specifically those in the gig economy where “workers…toil for nonhourly methods of wage payment,” are especially insidious. Gig work remains unprotected by wage laws and keeps workers, who likely identify as immigrant, non-white and/or female, in poverty. The author explores three subgroups within the gig economy—tip workers, clerical micro-task workers, and informalized gig-workers—through a historical lens, using reality TV shows, contemporary literature, and lived experiences as evidence. Modern ideas about tip work, humorously depicted in shows like Cheers and Alice, have been shaped by centuries-old attitudes toward domestic servitude and the idea that servants “accept [the master’s] pleasure” as their own. McClanahan situates tipwork’s “cousin,” clerical microwork, in the non-domestic work context of farm labor, which also faced increasing mechanization in the late-19th century. Those who produce (sometimes subversive) online poetry for pennies are just one example she offers of the “heirs” to industrial piece work and the deskilling it implies. In discussing the modern gig-work economy, McClanahan focuses on Uber drivers, especially those who have transformed their experiences into novels that deal with having “every movement monitored and logged” on the road while circulating in the world and navigating complex relationships with other service workers. Intelligent and timely, the book illuminates the often-hostile economic and cultural landscape of modern capitalism.

An eye-opening look at today’s service work and the forms of solidarity that have emerged to meet it.