If this NY mag article is to be believed you can hire house cleaners who are themselves homeless via www.homejoy.com a San Francisco based startup that has received $40 million in funding. Guess this says a lot about how out of whack the bay area real estate market is, but that is not what the article is about. Instead it tries to shine light on another issue, namely the fact that many recent startups (many of them falling in the broad (and equally meaningless) ‘sharing economy’ category) offer services that are performed by independent contractors instead of regular employees:

To explain why it’s possible for a cash-flush tech start-up to have homeless workers, it helps to know that the man I hired through Homejoy wasn’t a Homejoy employee at all. That’s because Homejoy doesn’t employ any cleaners — like many of its peer start-ups, it uses an army of contract workers to do its customers’ bidding. To hear Homejoy tell it, it’s simply the digital middleman that allows people seeking home-cleaning services to find people willing to do it. […] As the Washington Post wrote, “Homejoy is just organizing the masses of people who already offer their cleaning services independently.”

While the NY mag article makes it sound as if this is a fairly recent phenomenon (citing an abundance of startups relying on contract workers such as Uber, Lyft, Homejoy, Handy, Postmates, Spoonrocket, TaskRabbit, DoorDash or Washio) this practice is anything but new.

My first job fresh out of high school was working as a bike messenger for Der Kurier in Hannover. As part of that work i was required to wear a company shirt, a company issued messenger bag and could only work on days that they had scheduled me in. I also had do pay them rent for the radio and 20% of the fares that i earned. At that time this kind of ’employment’ was common for bike messengers in lots of places (i worked under similar conditions for other companies in Hannover, Berlin and New York). The only place where bike messengers were employed and paid by the hour and not by the delivery was in Amsterdam where i worked my last years as a messenger (at one company we even had a pension plan which means that i will draw a pension of €10 per year(!!) once i am 67).

As a bike messenger i never had a problem with being a contractor and being paid by the delivery (at high-demand times that meant more money and motivation to go extra fast and at low-demand times you could always read a book). But to my mind this construction has always been about limiting the cost of labour for employees. The fact that so many ‘Sharing Economy’ startups are working with contractors instead of employees makes it rather obvious that the sharing economy is much less about sharing ressources and much more about reducing the cost of labor. Or as Kevin Roose notes in the NY mag article:

Require a 1099 start-up to reclassify its workers as W-2 employees, and you radically change its ability to lower prices and undercut the competition — which was, in many cases, a key reason investors were interested in the first place.

So I finally killed (well deactivated) my Facebook account this morning after not using it for a month. in order to do so I had to log on one last time. Turns out that while I was away had tagged me in this picture taken at the 1st human powered rollecoaster in Vancouver in 1996:

Guess this is facebook’s farewell present to me: A picture where I am young, reckless & blond! If my memory serves me correctly this shot was taken after I had been eliminated in the semi (or quarter) finals of the main competition in Vancouver by crashing my bike so badly that i twisted my rear wheel. At that point I had been the last rider competing on a fixed gear bike after having edged out a victory from Riche Ditta (on the left with the white cap) in the previous round. Richie helped me finding a replacement rear wheel (with tubulars!) so that we could have another race in the fixed gear only competition, which he then won from me.

Bonus: probably also the earliest photographic evidence of me wearing the bicycle chain wristband which I am still wearing on this day about 17 years later.

It seems like i am surrounded by references to the public domain lately. sarai readers, conference topics, creative commons dedications and now there is even talk about renaming the public research programme of waag society (which i run) into ‘public domain’.

In the last two days i have however been reminded that this is nothing new. it appears that i have always been surrounded by people who care a lot about the public domain. My childhood/puberty (when is unsuccessfully trying to master the art of skateboarding) favorite video is powell peraltas 1988 classic skate movie ‘public domain‘. Skateboarding has always been about living in the physical public domain which nowadays even seems to includes fighting against technical protection measures.

After i stopped skateboarding i worked for almost ten years as a bike messenger. For bike messenger the urban public domain is where you spend a lot of your time (waiting for runs, socialising after work). I just came across this picture which i took while being in NYC for metropoloco in August 2000. I do not remember the name of the messenger, but this picture is one of my all time favorites as it really captures the spirit of being a bike messenger in making your living in the hostile environment of ever more privatizing cities. (the full text on the bandana reads ‘we live in public’)