In the winter of 2008, Leah Busque, a software engineer in Boston, got tired of trudging through the snow to pick up dog food. She and her husband, Kevin Busque, soon conceived and launched an online auction marketplace for those in similar situations. On TaskRabbit (originally called RunMyErrand), people with money to spare could post odd jobs, and people with time to spare could bid on the work. Users on both sides rated each transaction, and TaskRabbit took a twenty-per-cent service fee.
TaskRabbit is one of the best-known sites for what Busque and others have termed “service networking”—a friendly-sounding buzz phrase that refers to online marketplaces for labor. Elance and oDesk connect remote freelancers with businesses. TopCoder hosts computer-programming contests. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk lets people do quick, repetitive tasks for small amounts of money. When Apple launched the iPhone 5, in 2012, three hundred and fifty people hired others through TaskRabbit to wait in line in San Francisco and New York City. (They swapped in at the last minute to actually buy the phones.)
The original TaskRabbit made work look like a game. People posted gigs, and workers could bid on each task, listing their credentials and naming their price. They could move to the next “level” by earning points for responding quickly, referring a friend, and so on. Points garnered real-world rewards: when you reached level five, you got a TaskRabbit T-shirt; level ten came with business cards. But as TaskRabbit got more popular, the auction and point-system models became unwieldy. Task-doers were spending hours sifting through potential gigs, and users were getting frustrated that their tasks weren’t being picked up in time.
So, earlier this month, TaskRabbit gave up its freewheeling auction structure in favor of a model that looks more like, well, a Web site where people can find workers. Prospective employers, known as “Clients” (rather than “TaskPosters,” which had earlier replaced “senders”), now choose from one of four broad categories: “Cleaning,” “Handyman,” “Personal Assistance,” and “Moving Help.” After they select a category, clients receive a choice of a small number of “Taskers” (formerly “TaskRabbits,” or “runners”) with various hourly rates and skill sets. Workers can’t bid on specific gigs anymore, though TaskRabbit will still let them set filters so that they’re matched only for certain job categories. TaskRabbit has replaced the point system with what it calls the TaskRabbit Elite: the top five per cent of earners with approval ratings of 4.9 out of five get a special badge on their profiles and are featured more prominently in search results.
The model has built-in protections for workers. In the old auction model, a TaskRabbit could set a price with no bottom limit; now Taskers set hourly rates (which can be different for different types of gigs), and a Tasker’s rate can never be lower than the highest minimum wage in the cities in which TaskRabbit is active. The company also added an insurance policy, guaranteeing a million dollars of coverage for each task. It’s rare that a laundry-folding mishap will require a million-dollar payout, but the insurance helps the company’s reputation.
The new TaskRabbit—which follows the same principle as the old one, but strips away the veneer of fun—acknowledges what the site has been all along: a marketplace that helps one group of people work for another. It isn’t surprising that a site like this is booming. TaskRabbit launched in the middle of the recession. In December, 2007, unemployment was at five per cent; by October, 2009, it had risen to ten per cent. The jobless rate has since fallen again, to about six per cent as of June, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about a third of unemployed people have been seeking employment for more than half a year. The number of underemployed—that is, of people who need to work more or are hanging onto part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time ones—also swelled during the recession; twelve per cent of the U.S. population remains in that category.
If you belong to this group, TaskRabbit and its competitors may come as a relief. They let people offer their services directly and immediately through an organized network. They also give workers a semblance of professional identity: on TaskRabbit, you’re not just a freelance service worker, you’re a Tasker. John Horton, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, told me that thousands of freelancers list oDesk as their “employer” on LinkedIn. “They’re not really oDesk employees,” Horton said. “But they want to be identified with something.” Rachel Botsman and Roo Roger, authors of “What’s Mine Is Yours,” argue that a “collaborative consumption” revolution is under way, with people shifting from private ownership of goods and services to sharing them through online marketplaces. “I can see a day when people will have not one ‘job’ but a portfolio of ‘on-demand’ work,” Botsman told me in an e-mail.
Even if Botsman is right, that day is far off. For most workers, online marketplaces are supplements, not replacements. According to Johnny Brackett, a TaskRabbit spokesman, ninety per cent of Taskers work part-time. And while the new TaskRabbit is more streamlined and treats Taskers more professionally, it also makes them more interchangeable, commoditizing the work they do. TaskRabbit hasn’t completely done away with the individual: people still list skills on their profiles, and the algorithm takes these preferences into account when it matches clients with Taskers. But for the ninety per cent of TaskRabbit gigs that fall into those four main categories, one personal assistant or handyman is, from the employer’s perspective, usually as good as the next.
The value in a service like Lyft, which connects people with a network of fellow-users offering paid rides in their own cars, isn’t that it lets you choose a particular driver, but that it makes getting around significantly easier. The recently revamped Airbnb, which lets people rent out their homes, resembles nothing so much as a hotel-booking site. It has become clear that these services are less about community than about commerce. The same is true of TaskRabbit. And in this economy, those who are doing the hiring recognize that there are enough underemployed people who can organize your belongings that finding the ideal Tasker for the job isn’t as useful as finding one who can do it quickly.
This isn’t to say that TaskRabbit is to blame for the present state of affairs; in fact, it’s probably helping underemployed people find work that might otherwise have been difficult to track down. “Increasing demand for relatively low-skilled people is an attractive proposition,” Horton told me. “Sometimes the sharing-economy rhetoric is sort of B.S.-y. It really is rich people buying from poor people. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” If you’re a Tasker, it might be disappointing to discover that you’re expected to clean up after the birthday party rather than, say, pick up the cake. But doing the dishes may be better than nothing.
