Saturday, January 2, 2016

How "Boob Jobs" Affect You and Me

Putting the finishing touches on my research paper, "Boob Jobs in the Share Economy," I share the brief conclusion section. Your feedback is welcome. As for me, I have learned that the work of strippers is something like the canary in the mine: as these women are exploited, in like fashion, so are many of us....

IV. Boob Jobs: Implications for the Share Economy
        The erosion of the employment relationship is the backdrop for this study of exotic dancers. By one estimate, 53 million Americans engage in freelance work, including 21.1 million who are classified as independent contractors.[1] The share economy refers to an “economic model in which individuals are able to borrow or rent assets owned by someone else.”[2]
        My study explores a small but revealing corner of the share economy. The business model for strip clubs creates value for owners by commoditizing sexual labor.[3] By transmuting employment into tenancy and contractor relationships, clubs monetize a dancer’s sexual labor into phony assets that pay tips and fees to support her co-workers. Clubs should pay dancers and their co-workers, however, in a conventional employment relationship. The current transactional model not only enables clubs to exploit dancers, emcees, DJs, house moms, bartenders and bouncers by avoiding payment of wages, but also frees clubs from paying taxes and premiums to Social Security, Medicare, health insurance plans, unemployment and worker’s compensation. By shirking these responsibilities, clubs add to the burden for responsible employers and individual taxpayers who pay into these mandated benefit programs.
        The work arrangements for exotic dancers is hardly novel, however. It resembles conventional work that offers individuals the illusion of control over one’s work schedule.[4] The transactional model that clubs use to abuse contactor agreements at the expense of the employment relationship has disquieting implications for millions of workers who perform mundane work.
        What is the connection between strip clubs, on the one hand, and mainstream firms in the share economy? The research in this study is part of my broader attempt to map the full range of occupations that are unlawfully structured in independent contractor relationships. My preliminary results show that a wide range of work is misclassified along similar lines that clubs use. These jobs— and more broadly, their industries— include telecommunications (cable[5] and fiber optic installers[6]); cleaning services (maids[7] and janitors[8]); protective services (security guards[9] and police[10]) construction (drywall installers,[11] window and door installers,[12] carpenters,[13] painters,[14] HVAC technicians,[15] and welders[16]); health care (nurses[17] and ultrasound technicians[18]); distribution (warehouse workers[19] and package delivery workers[20]); local transportation (school bus drivers,[21] cabbies,[22]—and perhaps of most significance due to its rising popularity, ride share drivers[23]); and others (garment workers[24] and grocery baggers[25]).
        Emerging as a theme in this research, companies offer individuals illusory ownership of their human capital by entering into independent contractor agreements.[26] For example, Uber and strip clubs share a common strategy of shifting basic infrastructure costs to their workers. Consider that Uber’s licensing agreement requires driver-operators to bear all the cost of maintaining cellular accessibility to the company’s dispatching system.[27] This mimics the club strategy of requiring dancers to pay rent for dressing rooms and stage time. Uber, like clubs, lowers its costs of operation by failing to pay for mandated social safety nets that are underfunded.[28] And while Uber and strip clubs play up the angle that workers can enhance their freedom by being independent contractors, the reality is that many individuals enter into an exploitative work arrangement that mirrors other forms of exploitation in their personal lives.[29]
My analysis concludes with a professional confession. As I researched misclassification cases for my larger study, I eliminated exotic dancer cases from consideration. My reasons were more visceral than sophisticated, but included a mixture of moral superiority and the idea that sexual labor is not real work. However, new cases involving dancers cropped up as often as those involving cable installers and similarly mundane jobs. At some point, I discerned similarities: the day-to-day nature of toiling for a living; the putative employer’s continued reliance on these workers; the shifting of business costs to low-wage workers in the form of bogus rental and lease contracts; corporate over-reaching in the form of fines, claw-back contracts for work deficiencies, and outright wage theft from people who appear to live on the margins of income security; and the long-term implications that possibly millions of workers are now strategically detached from legal protections for employees. A growing segment of dancers, Uber drivers, and other misclassified workers no longer play the passive role of boobs.[30] They realize they have been beguiled into accepting these false conditions of employment.[31] Owning up to my initial dismissal of strippers as exploited employees, I came to a new appreciation for Margaret Meade’s enduring precept: “Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.”[32]




No comments: