‘Don't take a poo!': Worker misbehaviour in on‐demand ride‐hail carpooling

• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12159
• Published date: 01 July 2020

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Worker misbehaviour in ride-hail carpooling 145

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:2

ISSN 1468-005X

‘Don’t take a poo!’: Worker misbehaviour in

on-demand ride-hail carpooling

Emily Reid-Musson , Ellen MacEachen and

Emma Bartel

Workers actively negotiate contradictions between discourses

of exibility and entrepreneurialism and actually existing con-

ditions of risk and precarity endemic to online self-employed

work. This article examines how ride-hail drivers count-

er-branded UberPool—a carpool ride-hail service—as ‘Uber-

Poo’. While marketed as a solution to congestion, UberPool

created risky and coercive working conditions for ride-hail

drivers. Our analysis is from a study on ride-hail driver ex-

periences of health and safety risks in a large Canadian city.

We engage the concept of organisational misbehaviour to ex-

plore how drivers mocked and avoided carpool rides despite

the threat of penalties. We characterise misbehaviour as a

struggle over lack of control and lack of autonomy in self-em-

ployed work, providing evidence that despite their structural

powerlessness, some ride-hail drivers do set limits around the

work they are willing to accept. Algorithmic management and

ambiguously classied ride-hail work are thus subject to some

degree of subversion.

Keywords: self-employment, ride-hail, organizational mis-

behaviour, misclassication, precarious employment, online

communities.

Introduction

Independent contractor work—including casual, temporary, part-time, freelance or

own-account self-employed work—is not entirely novel in the labour market (Cranford

et al., 2005). Digital platforms, however, permit large numbers of workers to be con-

nected via algorithmic forms of management, control and surveillance (Huws, 2014;

Lee et al., 2015; Srnicek, 2017; Wood et al., 2018). Promises of freedom, exibility and

entrepreneurialism are frequently associated with the gig economy, implying that on-

line intermediaries connect and empower service providers and users as equals.

Research has shown that platforms rest upon ‘orchestrated insecurity’ and asymmetric

information hierarchies between workers and platforms (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016;

Van Doorn, 2017). Algorithmic rules and conditions managing platform-mediated

work, including how work activities are allocated, remunerated and evaluated, are

deliberately withheld from workers. Given the management, economic and legal

Emily Reid-Musson (ereidmusson@uwaterloo.ca), School of Public Health and Health Systems, Uni-

versity of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Ellen MacEachen, School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Can-

ada

Emma Bartel, School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

146 New Technology, Work and Employment

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

conditions of platform-based work, the challenges of organising workers are high.

However, there have been notable legal and regulatory decisions in recent years that

support worker representation and access to rights (Jamil, 2017; Johnston, 2017;

Johnston & Land-Kazlauskas, 2018; Tucker, 2018).

This paper examines UberPool, an on-demand carpooling service and Uber’s

lowest cost option for passengers. In on-demand carpooling, such as UberPool

or Lyft Line, multiple passengers can be added to a single dynamic ride with

multiple pickup/drop-off locations. We focus here on drivers’ negative experi-

ences with UberPool, which some called ‘UberPoo’. Drivers had not signed up

or knowingly agreed to provide UberPool, as they envisaged performing higher

earning services such as UberX, UberSelect or UberXL. Once enrolled on the

Uber platform, however, drivers were automatically ‘cross-dispatched’

UberPool rides and could face penalties for refusing to accept the rides. These

realities jeopardised the entrepreneurial promise originally augured by Uber

work—principally, that drivers would enjoy choice and control over their work

as self-employed drivers. Analysis is drawn from a broader qualitative study

involving focus groups and interviews with ride-hail drivers and their ‘manag-

ers’, combined with a systematic analysis of an online driver forum.

Using the concept of organisational misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999),

we explore how misbehaviour may be taking shape in the on-demand workplace,

based on our analysis of driver reactions to UberPool. Organisational misbehaviour is

signicant as a conceptual tool in labour research because it captures informal worker

practices that do not conform with managerial expectations of appropriate behaviour

at work. Misbehaviour was endemic within Taylorist management contexts, Ackroyd

and Thompson’s analysis revealed, and included sabotage, pilfering and absenteeism.

Our analysis focuses on the ways some Uber drivers satirised UberPool and limited

the UberPool rides they performed, despite being threatened with penalties and re-

moval by Uber.

While ride-hail driving is marketed as an entrepreneurial relationship between driv-

ers and platform companies, driver experiences with UberPool revealed underlying

organisational conditions of ‘algorithmic management’ (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016).

Uber manages its drivers through data-driven organisational decision-making and its

digital application, such thatit is undeniable that Uber—characterised by both its algo-

rithmic and human management practices—oversees and directs the behaviour, remu-

neration and evaluation of its driver eet. It is on this basis that the classication of

drivers as self-employed is highly contested in courts. The legal classication of Uber

drivers in most jurisdictions as self-employed, combined with the algorithmic man-

agement imposed by Uber around the pacing, timing and rewards of the work, are

consequently signicant organisational characteristics of ride-hail work and, indeed,

important factors underlying organisational misbehaviour in this context. We discuss

how misbehaviour is related to drivers’ own thwarted expectations of autonomy that

ride-hail driving promises. The organisational features of Uber—marked by a tension

between an algorithmic managerial approach and the legal and social conventions of

self-employed autonomy—fuelled misbehaviour among drivers, who strove to re-

claim the autonomy they expected from this line of work.

The focus on misbehaviour contributes to a small but growing body of research on

the strategies that unorganised groups of workers in the ‘platform gig economy’ are

developing (Chen, 2018; Graham and Shaw, 2017; Johnston, 2017; Johnston & Land-

Kazlauskas, 2018; Newlands, Lutz, and Fieseler, 2018; Scholz, 2017; Srnicek, 2017;

Wood, Lehdonvirta, and Graham, 2018). While it is undeniable that enormous power

differences between workers and platforms exist, there may be more nuanced power

dynamics emerging at this nexus than some analysis would suggest. It is these dynam-

ics we wish to explore. The analysis is inherently exploratory, as the broader study did

not focus on resistance, dissent or misbehaviour; instead, the themes and arguments in

this paper emerged from the ndings.

The article proceeds by examining the concept of organisational misbehaviour in

relation to current research on dissent among on-demand ride-hail drivers. We then