The sharing economy — think Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Couchsurfing, TaskRabbit — is on a revolutionary path that is disrupting established industries in ways few had ever conceived.
If you’re in the taxi or limousine business, Uber and Lyft are your worst nightmare. These companies have emerged almost overnight to become major players who are luring customers away from old habits with a combination of convenience, price, efficiency and even “cool”. Airbnb is similarly taking market share from hotels, motels and inns. While TaskRabbit — really only one of many startups that connect people who need stuff done with the people who can do it for them (do my shopping, write my term paper, clean my garage) — is happy to change how you go about buying almost any service.
It’s a revolution, for sure, but a decidedly one-sided one so far, driven by demand. What does that mean for all these sharers who are, in large part, working for big companies without ever being deemed employees? For now, they’re an unorganised group of suppliers. But that could change, with disruptive results.
The sharing economy depends on people with excess capacity to provide something of value to others. And those people must have a desire to monetise that capacity. For Uber and Lyft, that’s people with cars; for Airbnb and Couchsurfing, it’s a spare room or apartment; for TaskRabbit, it’s a small degree of expertise and lots of free time.
Uber, for instance, relies on regular people who have a car who decide to drive someone from point A to point B for compensation. These people aren’t employees of Uber, so the company even limits its cost of managing this outsourced workforce. Pay enough to entice people to drive their cars, and let the computer and mobile interface manage everything.
The net result is a huge population of individuals who effectively work for Uber despite the fact that they have no formal employment status. And their compensation is completely determined by Uber, without regard to any “employee” rights or other considerations. Call it employees without benefits.
Sometimes called a "revealed infrastructure,” this economy requires only that individuals are willing to enter a transactional relationship with a company to deliver services to customers generated by that company. End of story. Individuals bear all the fixed costs (car repairs, insurance, safety risks) and most of the overhead costs (training, equipment).
But what about the supply side? What about all those people with cars, spare apartments or couches, or time to run errands for others? The big question is what will they do? Will they continue to operate as sole proprietors in a transactional way, or will they seek to organise in some fashion to gain power — that is, more money — from the companies that send them all these customers?
Revolt from within
On the one hand, why would these people do anything to disrupt what they’ve got? They run their own show, choose when they want to work, and get paid for something they’ve had all along, something that previously just sat there and generated no income.
On the other hand, what would happen if Uber drivers decided to form a union, or some agglomeration of people who can drive a harder bargain? In some ways, such a move is almost predictable. Add in the incredible company valuations — and wealth — that is accruing to the people who run the revealed infrastructure economy, and it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where the picture changes. Uber et al are currently exploiting a tremendous opportunity, and it’s worthy of applause. But it can change.
Of course, it’s hardly as simple as that. For one thing, if Uber drivers join forces to demand higher pay, couldn’t Uber just rely on those drivers who choose not to? The drivers who subscribe to the notion that they are entrepreneurs, rather than interchangeable data points in a massive algorithm. This prisoner’s dilemma is a nontrivial barrier to organising.
The other challenge is even simpler than the prisoner’s dilemma. Like individual shareholders who are completely disenfranchised by modern rules of corporate governance, individuals who happen to drive for Uber, or rent a room to Airbnb customers, may care less about anything other than what they get for their troubles. Organising shareholders into a common force is incredibly difficult.
Maybe the new revolution will come from within. Unions are a very twentieth century solution to unequal distribution of gains among owners and workers. Uber relies on thousands upon thousands of drivers, each working independently and anonymously.
I can imagine some young man or woman developing an app that allows drivers to share information seamlessly, a first step to creating a coherent collection of people who have something in common. And an even smarter young man or woman might figure out how to create a startup that offers services to this community while simultaneously exploiting the inherent power imbalance that has characterised the first wave of the sharing economy.
Just like Uber, Airbnb, and the rest all seemed to come out of nowhere to establish themselves as disruptive players, why can’t the scenario I describe not come to pass, this time disrupting the disrupters?
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About the author
Sydney is a professor of strategy and leadership, and Dean for Executive Education, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the author of 16 books, including Why Smart Executives Fail. Follow him on twitter: @sydfinkelstein
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