Food delivery and task-based services like Postmates, Seamless, and TaskRabbit have grown considerably in recent years, aided by the presence of a pool of underemployed, precarious workers who have no choice but to take this kind of unreliable contract work. In The Baffler, Olivia Rutigliano examines how the branding and marketing of these companies renders these workers invisible, even as it elevates their customers’ demand for convenience to a sacred right. Here’s an excerpt:
Food delivery services, of course, aren’t the only market players who peddle the existential added value of making it seem as though the consumers using their service have superseded the tasks they would otherwise be performing for themselves. TaskRabbit, which enlists freelance labor to meet just-in-time demand, lays out the master-servant dynamic at the heart of its business model quite baldly: “We do chores. You live life.”
It’s a line that suggests there is a whole class of people who are permitted (or maybe even destined) to endure bad conditions, long hours, and low pay, so that another class of people can have their cravings instantly gratified. In his 1899 treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class, American economist Thorstein Veblen (who predicted this kind of new feudalism in the twentieth century techno-business world) explained that the leisure class’s exploits are grounded in a primordial capitalist division of labor: “The institution of a leisure class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination between employments, according to which some employments are worthy and others unworthy.” Messengers bike through the rain, snow, and traffic, lugging huge packages—all because the service on offer is not worth the consumer’s time. Here’s Veblen’s gloss on how the work of underlings becomes the totem of leisure-class privilege: “As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and the achievements which characterize a life of leisure, and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit.”
But these exploitive ads are especially remarkable for bringing the Veblenian script of our economic life front and center. Indeed, they are explaining that it is precisely this dynamic that makes their services so great, so convenient, and so satisfying. And these companies are all imitating one another with this rhetoric—competing for the optimal way to market an all-but-invisible workforce.
Image via recode.