True Costs
Building solidarity with Willy Solis
Over the past few years, the sharing economy has given way to the gig economy, driven by the rise of apps like Instacart and Uber. During the pandemic, gig workers have experienced disproportionate risk, as many set out to work without employee protections or rights. The rise of gig work parallels a larger shift in the US toward contract work and job precarity. We talked to Willy to understand what’s at stake in gig work, his organizing efforts, and how normalizing exploitation erodes the broader social safety net.
Xiaowei Wang:
Could you introduce yourself a little?
Willy Solis:
My name is Willy Solis. I'm a gig worker, and I work with Gig Workers Collective to advocate for gig workers’ rights. With Gig Workers Collective, we've been organizing a lot of events and protests because we feel like at the end of the day, it's really important to get our voices heard by the companies and the general public [and for them] to understand what our concerns and grievances are. The work that we do is really important, and it requires us to be constantly applying pressure to have the overall focus of gig work be on the workers themselves, not on the companies that hire us.
Recently, we've been working with MIT on a couple of projects. The first one was a Shipt calculator, which was basically a way for us to be able to screenshot our earnings and then have the Shipt calculator figure out exactly what our earnings are now compared to what they were when we had a transparent pay model. We're able to show gig workers directly and very quickly how much money they're losing by allowing these companies to get away with the black box algorithm. Gigbox is a little different. It's a spin on this same concept where we want to allow transparency and for gig workers to be able to understand their pay a little bit better. But it involves more apps, and it involves a much broader range of calculations so that gig workers can have more transparency and understanding of what they're earning.
At Gig Workers Collective we're looking to become a resource for workers, not only a place that screams out about grievances, but also a part of a community that uplifts each other. But there's so much associated with that, cost wise, that it goes beyond the scope of what we can do as an organization. But I think it's really important to have places where we can have resources and community so that we can have things like mutual aid and be beneficial to the vast majority of gig workers. Not only gig workers, but also tech workers at the companies. It's really important to bring those two together because, at this point, that's what it's going to take. If you don't take the tech side and merge that with the gig worker side, then it's not going to be very fruitful in the end because you have two different outlooks on the same economy. So it's really important to merge those two viewpoints in order to become a resource for everyone to be able to take part of.
Xiaowei:
What was your Logic School experience? What did you walk away with it from?
Willy:
It was amazing, to be honest with you, like, I've never been a part of anything like that. To be in the same space with so many people who are interested in the same things that I am and in organizing—it was really inspiring to be a part of it. I gained a lot of experience and knowledge from others and from the guests that we had on various days, and the amount of information was just overwhelming. I really appreciated the space and the freedom to have the conversations that we were having, and it created such camaraderie with people that, you know, generally wouldn't have met each other.
Xiaowei:
Touching upon the camaraderie, I remember California Prop 22 in 2020 and how, when you opened up the Lyft app, there was messaging to vote yes on Prop 22, which was in the interest of Lyft and against gig workers having access to benefits. Engineers and designers had to implement that. I also remember an opinion piece by an Uber engineer advocating for folks to vote no, as an expression of solidarity with gig workers. What kinds of camaraderie and solidarity in tech work do we need to be thinking about?
Willy:
What I feel is that the engineers and the programmers at these companies don't really understand what impact these apps and their jobs actually have on other workers. So having the conversations with people at these companies and letting them know the concerns, the grievances that are associated with the programming or with the projects that they are working on also really empowers them to question the work that they're doing. Otherwise, they would never know what impact they're having on society as a whole if they don't have communication with the actual gig workers. I think that’s where the intersection is—it’s that we can have really good camaraderie and conversations about the issues that gig workers ultimately face. Because the gig companies are basically all powerful and all knowing, and they have all the information and knowledge that we don't as gig workers. Again, that's something that I think programmers are disconnected from—not intentionally, but they are disconnected from the actual ramifications of the programs. It's really important to have those conversations with the programmers and the engineers who are actually programming these projects, right?
Part of the main thing that we're trying to do is get into the minds and the hearts of the actual programmers. We actually have contacts within various organizations, including people inside these companies who made contact with us to have conversations. It's really important to educate. That is the ultimate goal of the organizing that we do—to not only educate the consumer or gig workers, but also the people behind the software so that they understand what it is that they're getting involved with, the ramifications of it, because it's always hidden behind propaganda—propaganda being perpetrated upon society as a whole by these gig companies that makes it seem as if they are doing something good and uplifting the entire community. And they're not. They're only doing and saying things to make it seem like they are so that they can continue to exploit workers. At the top of our priorities, or the top of my priorities, is to educate.
Xiaowei:
It seems like a lot of the parallel work is also building alternatives to these platforms, and some companies have recently sprung up that are either co-ops or brand themselves as ethical alternatives. What do you think of this new landscape?
Willy:
I think it's really important because that's the nature of the direction that we need to go in, to go into a co-op where workers are owning the companies themselves. Because we are the companies. Without us there is no Uber, there's no Lyft, there's no Instacart, there's no Shipt.
I think it’s also really dangerous for any company to take on that label of “ethical,” because it requires them to tread a very, very fine line. It's really important to understand the dynamics of gig work and platforms. When I say it's dangerous, it's dangerous in that greed can sneak in and take over. It's really important that any co-opor organization that claims to be ethical is really for and by gig workers themselves. If it's not for and by gig workers, then you're going to fall into a situation where greed takes over. And you're no better than the other companies. There are examples of those companies that have tried to take that high road and then find themselves in a situation where they're trying to make money for a few people. I think real co-ops are in our future, but it’s something that's very difficult to obtain.
Xiaowei:
To pivot a little, I’m wondering if you could tell us about gig work in Texas—mainly because I think that when a lot of us think about gig work, it’s in the context of big cities like New York.
Willy:
I live in the suburbs of Dallas. Texas is a very large state. The way we experience gig work here—it's very lonely. I'm actually doing it right now [Editors note: Willy called into this interview from his car.] I've been doing it for the last couple hours, and it becomes very lonely work. Because you're driving these exorbitant amounts of miles—my last order was twenty-one miles. That's one way, that's not round trip. In a lot of places that will put you in the next county or even in some places the next state. So, you know, taking into consideration that gig work requires a lot of travel and a lot of wear and tear on your vehicle, there's a high cost associated with gig work that sometimes goes underneath the radar. Because these good companies try to make it sound like we're making so much money. The reality is that we're not, and we have to be very careful about the orders and selective about the orders that we take. If we don't, we find ourselves in the red and the negative very quickly. I think it's really important to understand that. I mean, I may be in a market where the mileage is an issue. There are other markets where the pay doesn't correlate with the actual work that's being provided or the services being provided. I think it's really important to also understand that gig companies try to subsidize all the costs that are associated with the labor of the work that we do in various ways, whether we're the ones taking on that cost or it's being passed on to the consumer. The companies want us to basically live off of tips. It's really important to understand those dynamics before you start trying to grasp each individual marketplace. Once you understand that, then you can fully understand what it takes to be a gig worker in New York and what it takes to be a gig worker in Texas, because there are some very significant differences.
Xiaowei:
Could you elaborate on the mutual aid work you mentioned?
Willy:
In the work that I've been doing for and with Gig Workers Collective, we run into situations where people are in financial straits or distress, whether it be because of a natural disaster, a tornado hitting their house, or just realities of the work that we do, which can result in violence against the worker themselves or a family member who is a worker, so we need to have avenues to provide mutual aid and mutual support. Also, in tandem with that, it's very important to be a resource for workers when they run into issues or concerns or where they file grievances with the government for things like wage theft. I'm heavily involved in those fights as well and into communicating and connecting workers with attorney generals’ offices from various states, having conversations with them about what we face as gig workers and how we're being taken advantage of and exploited. It's a combination of both financial support for people and also providing them an avenue or a way to get connected with the actual resources or the ultimate solution that they actually need.
Xiaowei:
What’s your wildest dream for your organizing work or more broadly for the industry as a whole?
Willy:
I envision that at the end of this fight, good companies will succumb to actual worker power. And that it also comes in the form of co-ops and us actually owning the platform because we are the product—we are the service. Without us such companies wouldn't exist. They've exploited us long enough, where they're not in a position to operate without us. It's really important for us to get our power back and basically take advantage of the fact that we hold that kind of power, where we can make billion-dollar companies shut down for the work that they're exploiting. I think the resource part of it is really important because without having the resources or availability of being able to connect workers with the solutions, resources, and pathways, you will never get the rise of power and solidarity. All of these paths go hand in hand with each other for us to have the wildest dream, which is to have an economy that is by and for gig workers.
I would say that it's time for us as a society to understand that work is very valuable. And for us to understand that workers themselves are the ones who are putting themselves on the line for society as a whole. We need to understand that those costs that are being transferred over to the gig worker aren’t just to gig workers, they’re to the actual society as a whole. The exploitation that's happening, it's taking a true cost directly from the social safety nets that we've collected over the years. That strain is only going to hold so long, so it's really important that everyone comes together and understands and fights back.
Willy Solis is a Shipt Shopper from the Dallas metroplex. In 2019, Willy began grassroots organizing his fellow Shipt Shoppers and in February 2020, he formalized a relationship with Gig Workers Collective where he has functioned as the lead organizer for Shipt Shoppers nationally. Organizing successes include securing PPE for hundreds of thousands of Shipt Shoppers, and the repayment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in misappropriated tips. Willy has partnered with organizations such as Human Rights Watch, MIT, and Coworker on generative worker-centric research and data about the gig economy. Willy is passionate about building worker power, policy, and social and economic justice. In the past year, Willy’s work has been covered by Time Magazine, Dallas Morning News, NY Times, LA Times, BBC, Boston Globe, and Thomson Reuters. He has been profiled by NPR and The Hill. Find Willy at https://twitter.com/WillySolis357
To support Gig Workers Collective a 5013c non-profit, visit https://www.gigworkerscollective.org/