Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray, Spent Behind the Wheel: Drivers’ Labor in the Uber Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

In Spent Behind the Wheel, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray adopt sociological and legal perspectives to examine contemporary professional passenger driving, focusing on Uber drivers’ labour in the gig economy. Drawing on interviews with drivers, driver-organizers, and members of licensing commissions, as well as legal archives and regulatory documents related to the passenger driving industry, Hua and Ray reveal that professional passenger driving is essentially a form of reproductive labour, in which the extraction of driver vitality and liveliness is naturalized by racial and biopolitical logics. Despite some changes in operations brought by the technology, app-hail transportation companies largely sustain existing industry standards and share the colonial accumulation and exploitation logics with traditional taxi companies.

The book is divided into 4 chapters that focus on topics including debt and ownership, compensation and insurance, ticketing and criminalization, and accommodation and disability justice. Chapter 1, “It’s Not the App: The Labor of Driving,” introduces the regulatory context of the passenger-ride industry from a historical perspective. Hua and Ray argue that ownership equating to greater mobility and freedom is an illusion advocated across the professional passenger-ride industry. Ownership of the right to drive is what obscures the extractive relationships between companies, passengers, and drivers and facilitates the erosion and exploitation of drivers’ life chances. In Chapter 2, “Financializing Driver Lives: Workers’ Compensation and Unemployment Insurance,” the authors illustrate two interdependent logics of life value – one anchoring ownership of lives in the calculus of human life value (slavery) and another extending the calculus of human life value into speculation on life values (insurance). This chapter focuses on drivers’ fight for insurance, uncovering how their vitalities are financialized and used up to facilitate the lives of others, the city, and ultimately the nation. Chapter 3, “Driver Criminalization: Systemic Racism in the Passenger-Ride Industry,” elaborates on how the structured antagonisms in the industry are deployed to criminalize drivers and facilitate industry accumulation. In Chapter 4, “Who Gets Disability Justice? Rethinking Accommodation,” Hua and Ray contend that work conditions of professional passenger driving might disable drivers, such as premature death for drivers. Despite the antagonism between drivers and disabled passengers, disability-justice activists and drivers both attach great importance to liveness and interdependency, so they share common frameworks of mobility, confinement, and functionality to challenge systemic debilitation. Overall, these chapters are used to uncover how drivers perform care and reproductive work akin to domestic and household labour and how drivers’ capacities and vitalities are drained to benefit passengers, capitals, cities, and states through racial and biopolitical power.

The main contribution that Hua and Ray make is in drawing feminist theoretical insights on gender, reproduction, and labour into the analysis of drivers’ labour. There are many case studies on work and labour in the gig economy, but Hua and Ray are among the few who have provided a detailed and comprehensive theoretical framework. While most research adopts labour process theory – an important Marxist approach in the study of relations of production in industrial capitalism – to examine issues in the gig economy, this book identifies feminist theory as an important theoretical resource. In conversation with feminist scholars, Hua and Ray argue that drivers’ lives function as reproductive raw materials to drive capital accumulation for app-hail and taxi companies and ultimately generate surplus for the nation. Similar to the de-monetizing of household and domestic tasks through the institution of slavery, drivers’ reproductive labour is de-monetized and thus socially and politically undervalued. Drivers’ lives are made valuable only insofar as they work for consumers’ lives and sustain a national economy. Their lives are capitalized based not only on monetary value but also on the value of life in the future. In the calculation of insurance, drivers’ lives are less valuable that can be easily discarded, but necessarily included in aggregate charts to benefit the industry investors. In this way, a national legal framework is established and justified to transform drivers’ lives, not only their labour, into “raw materials,” making their lives predictable, tradeable, and extractable. In this sense, professional passenger driving is part of the reproductive economy of intimate service labour.

Another key contribution of Hua and Ray’s work is their illustration of the structured antagonisms in the industry and their attention to the interdependency of lives. Much of what we know about relations in the gig economy centres on the relationship between gig workers and platform companies. Hua and Ray detail the mutual interdependency of drivers and passengers. App-hail companies characterize working-class, mostly male and immigrant taxi drivers as servility and misogyny as a potential passenger threat and thus antagonize drivers against (particularly vulnerable and/or feminine) passengers. Hua and Ray report that drivers and passengers are entwined in mutual precarity. This kind of racial narrative of masculine threat, depicted as a gendered concern, not only ignores drivers’ exposure to workplace harm but also obscures the racial power that leverages gender and race as matters of personal identity to drive industry profit. Hua and Ray also disclose that the broader legal framework of discrimination casts drivers and passengers in antagonism through the calculations of value and lives. The framework distinguishes rehabilitative lives from reproductive lives, resulting in discriminatory outcomes. Rehabilitative lives are those of the “worthy disabled” who are imagined as employable, while reproductive lives are tied to those with the ability to serve and attend to worthy lives. These value calculations place them in the context of disability justice and reproductive labour. Both drivers’ calls for health and passengers’ calls for mobility are thus threatened by systematic debilitation.

Spent Behind the Wheel is a must-read for readers interested in work and labour in the gig economy. Those who follow the development of the professional passenger driving industry closely will also find this book inspiring. Considering the rapid expansion of the gig economy and the increasing opportunities of gig work over the past few years, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s critical analysis of drivers’ reproductive labour is certainly timely and highly valuable.

Xing Luo

University of Saskatchewan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v90.0029.