What Happened to the Wage?

On September 5th, 2018, Uber screens began going red. A group of drivers was refusing to log in to the company's rideshare app and they had timed their action to take place as morning rush hour rolled across the world's time zones. While the protesters watched the online maps, car availability dropped—and prices went up—in Melbourne, Liverpool, Dallas, and Miami. "Keep it up guys," one driver posted, alongside a screenshot of the high prices. "Until 10 a.m." Uber had been hit with an international strike.

At the core of the four-hour-long strike, according to its organizers from RideShare Drivers United (http://ridesharedriversunited.com/), lay the question of who rideshare drivers really were. Uber took the position that its "driver-partners" operated as individual entrepreneurs. Max B, from Australia, begged to differ: "I have no control over the price, I don't know where I am going and I don't know how much I'll get paid, so how can I be an independent contractor?" (Thomsen 2018). "Uber controls the market in Australia," observed another driver. "At least 90 percent of my trips are with them" (Chau 2018). The strike, then, was about monopoly power and driver loyalty. It was also about forms of payment.

It is surely no accident that Max B mentioned price and pay during his statement to the press. Indeed, in Australia, one of the drivers' demands was that Uber cease paying them a pre-set fee per ride and, instead, offer pay based on mileage and time spent.¹ In making this demand, RideShare Drivers United did not speak the language of a 20th-century labor union.

Figure 1.

Driver-uploaded screenshots during the September 5th international strike. Images from http://ridesharedriversunited.com/fast4-uber-log-off-strike-5-sep-2018-6am-until-10am/.

Drivers were not calling themselves "employees" and not asking for a simple hourly wage. Nevertheless, in their own idiom, they were struggling over toil and money. They were enacting the politics of remuneration.

This collection of articles engages with the world that made the four-hour strike possible. Everywhere, the economic lexicon is awash in strange types of income: people earn stock options, piecework pay, independent

Figure 2.

A Rideshare Driver's United announcement for the September 5th strike. Image from http://ridesharedriversunited.com/fast4-uber-logoff-strike-5-sep-2018-6am-until-10am/.

contractor fees, stipends, entrepreneurial profits, performance incentives, derivative returns (Lipuma and Lee 2004), or proceeds from their human capital. Such arrangements depart from the wage, which recompenses workers through regular payments for specific amounts of their time. In contemporary capitalism, work seems to have been fragmented into pieces too fine for the wage. Much more indicative of the current moment is the work of rideshare drivers. Since driving is done in privately owned cars, squeezed in between other jobs or familial obligations, it is hard to tell where this work begins and ends (Rosenblat 2019). For these drivers—as for others—the present is a moment in which labor and money are being separated and reconnected in novel ways.

We argue for a renewed focus on this encounter between labor and money. In particular, we believe that anthropologists can fruitfully direct their gaze by thinking with the concept remuneration. We gloss remuneration, briefly, as the deserved recompense for labor. Anthropology is especially well-equipped to peer closely at the mundane details and strange arrangements that unfold in the very specific instant when payment changes hands. How, exactly, does cash get delivered?² By paying attention to that instant, anthropologists can take the measure of the debts and solidarities that make a payment into a deserved payment.

As we elaborate below, and through the ethnographic examples that follow, remuneration as a term includes the traditionally theorized wage, while gesturing to the diversity of other ways in which labor is compensated. By positing remuneration as a category broader than the wage, we mean to draw attention first of all to the...