This chapter offers an overview of the legal and regulatory landscape impacting gig work in America. It covers recent developments in case law and legislation at city, state, and federal levels, as well as regulatory activity involving administrative actors like the National Labor Relations Board. The legal landscape described here provides the background for the chapters that follow. It argues that there are in fact far fewer laws regulating gig work than one might expect because of the newness of this type of labor exchange, preemption rules that make it difficult for local (and sometimes state) authorities to regulate work, and because non-work issues – consumer protection, taxation, urban infrastructure – have tended to occupy regulators’ attention.

When companies like Uber and TaskRabbit appeared in Silicon Valley, there was a collective media swoon over these new app-based service-delivery corporations and their products. Pundits and journalists made it seem like these companies were ushering in not only an inevitable future, but a desirable one. Their content helped convince the public and regulators that these businesses were different from existing corporations – that they were startups with innovative technology platforms designed to disrupt established firms by efficiently connecting consumers to independent, empowered gig workers. Those in the media normalized and at times generated this rhetoric and framing, which was then taken up by politicians, amplified by academics, and finally enshrined in laws that legalized the business models of these companies. The positive, uncritical coverage prevailed for years and helped pave the way for a handful of companies that represent a tiny fraction of the economy to have an outsized impact on law, mainstream corporate practices, and the way we think about work. The force that powered the swoon was a relatively new and journalistically problematic trend in media: “tech” reporting.

This chapter first provides a framework for understanding recent local government approaches to aligning Uber and Lyft operations with urban transportation policy goals—including improving street safety, improving transportation access, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these approaches to setting policy and designing streets are not regulatory per se, though they can and have been used as de facto regulatory strategies. This “implicit” regulatory approach has arisen in part because most local governments in the U.S. lack the formal authority to regulate Uber and Lyft. Furthermore, most local governments also lack the data necessary to develop and/or enforce appropriate regulations of the app-enabled for-hire vehicle industry.

The chapter continues with a case study of how the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, in partnership with researchers at Northeastern University, developed a creative and partnership-driven approach to policy-making in the face of a severe data deficit. Agency staff and University researchers scraped data from the Uber and Lyft application programming interfaces and used those data to better understand how people move in San Francisco County. This work demonstrates the importance of innovative, goal-oriented problem-solving approaches to inform the regulation of increasingly complex city streets.

Before beginning to work for Lyft in 2013, Kevin Banks spent twenty-five years as a unionized carpenter in Northern California. He made “pretty dang good money” working in construction, especially after his promotion to general foreman. But Kevin was badly injured on the job, and the timing of the injury coincided with the Great Recession. A white, native-born American who came from a union family, Kevin had never performed nonunion, low-wage work, but by 2009, his job choices were limited. With a trace of resigned shame in his voice, he disclosed in one of our conversations over coffee

In the last decade, companies have emerged that straddle the high-wage technology and low-wage service sectors. These so-called “gig” companies use technology platforms to manage on-demand piecework in a growing number of sectors, including taxi, delivery, domestic work, nursing, and education. Technology-facilitated work is only the latest iteration of the rise of “nonstandard” or “contingent” work that is subcontracted, temporary, freelance, or on-demand. Gig companies are using new methods of labor mediation to control work remotely without accepting responsibility for its quality, to extract rents from workers, and to shift risks and costs of service provision onto workers, consumers, and the general public. Their practices leave workers vulnerable to economic insecurity, discrimination and harassment.

This chapter describes the ways in which gig companies are shaping regulation that favors their business model and preempts challenges to their employment practices, including the strategies and tactics that companies are using to maintain an independent contractor workforce in the face of contestations from workers, consumers, and regulators. We suggest that the expanding set of business interests joining ranks with gig companies to rewrite employment standards threatens a recalibration of what workers in the US expect in exchange for their labor.

As the United States tax system continues to grapple with how to tax workers in the gig economy, it confronts a number of questions about the nature and composition of the sector as well as the tax issues confronted by its participants. Many of these questions have proven difficult to answer due to a lack of adequate information. But the answers are important and will shape how tax and other areas of law (such as employment law, labor law, and antitrust) respond to the gig economy. Thus, the question of how to obtain the data and information necessary to formulate sound policies for gig work is vital. This chapter discusses the limitations of quantitative empirical research on the gig economy and argues that incorporating more qualitative approaches will help generate a more comprehensive understanding of the tax policy issues involved. Adoption of a diverse set of research approaches is crucial because the administrative tax return and labor survey data are incomplete and are shaped by prior decisions of gig economy firms and participants. Many questions remain that such quantitative data, by its very nature, cannot answer. This chapter first identifies the key tax issues at stake in the gig economy, including tax administration, worker classification, and tax impacts on workforce decisions. It then discusses the key ways in which quantitative approaches do not fully capture the tax issues at stake. Finally, it details how qualitative research methods such as interviews and case studies can flesh out gaps in the quantitative data, can help interpret quantitative data, and can help answer questions that extend beyond the scope of quantitative data, yielding a richer account of gig economy tax issues than that provided by quantitative tax administrative and labor survey data alone.

In September 2000, as activists laid siege to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank summit in Prague, South African Finance Minister Trevor Manual pondered the relevance of protesting against a system that felt so inevitable, ‘I know what they are against but have no sense of what they are for’ (Kingsnorth 2012). The anti-sweatshop movement was in full swing; it was part of anti-capitalist social movements at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century that became known as the ‘global justice movement’ under the banner ‘Another World Is Possible’.

Unlike the perceived indecisiveness of much of the anti-capitalist movement at the time, the anti-sweatshop movement remained steadfast in its demands. Issues such as liveable wages, independent worker organization, and collective bargaining remained at the forefront. The problem was not that workers and activists did not know what to fight for – it was how to get it. Achieving these fundamental rights becomes a seemingly insurmountable hurdle under conditions of globalized hypermobile capital. In the garment and footwear sectors, structural barriers, such as vertical disintegration, subcontracted manufacturing, just-in-time production practices, and end of the 2005 MFA, were said to have compounded the difficulties of establishing workers’ rights. This final prediction, which informed a decade of strategy by workers and activists in responding to the state, transnational capital, and domestic firms, would prove to be wrong.

Dynamics of the global garment sector

Between 1995 and 2013, the number of workers at the jobs related to global value chains increased from 296 million to 453 million, with much of this increase occurring before the 2008 financial crisis, demonstrating the profound ways in which GVCs were transforming the global labour market (ILO 2015). Most occurred in Global South countries, directed for Global North consumption Among these, clothing is one of the world's largest and oldest export industries.

The economic geography of the garment industry has been determined principally by retailers as well as brand-name merchandizers, or ‘buyers’, who, through their ability to select suppliers from around the world, concentrate enormous profits and power away from those who produce the goods (Gereffi 1994, 1999). The functionally and geographically disintegrated garment industry is one of the most exploitative, labour-intensive, and feminized sectors in the world economy (Hale and Wills 2011).