But outsourcing was never simply about cost cutting. It was also about the growing resistance to unionization and evading long-standing labor regulations. As companies expanded their reliance on a far-flung network of contingent staff, they shrank the number of on-site, full-time employees who were eligible to collectively bargain or to push for increasing workers' benefits. Following a largely untested management theory, a wave of corporations in the 1980s cut anything that could be defined as "non-essential business operations" - from cleaning offices to debugging software programs - in order to impress stockholders with their true value, defined in terms of "return on investment" [...] and "core competencies." [...]

[...] Microsoft outsourced the HR and payroll of its temporary workers to professional staffing agencies, firing workers who refused to be "converted" to temporary status. These agencies provided cheaper labor for Microsoft, as the company was not required to provide benefits or stock options for these permatemps now that they were officially employees of another company. [...] Microsoft argued that these workers had signed contracts indicating that they were temporary workers and not entitled to benefits and were compensated with "higher payer" and "fleixibility". OVer the next few years, Microsoft went to great lengths to differentiate temporary employees from its permanent staff, including different badge colors, different email addresses, lack of discounts at the company store, eliminating parking accessbibility, exclusion from social events, and cerrtainly none of the company's financial and medical benefits.

Ghost work economies sell themselves as software that can eliminate the expensive frictions of searching, matching, training, communicating with, and retaining workers. Yet, as Coase might have warned, communication and coordination among workers, and between workers and their employers, not only is necessary but is actually money well spent. For all the claims that ghost work can combine algorithms, artificial intelligence, and platform interfaces to replace the company's function as "the entrepreneur-coordinator, who directs production," there is evidence to the contrary. The transaction costs of ghost work don't melt away. Instead they are shifted to the shoulders of requesters and workers. Requesters must juggle all the management that typiaclly comes with scoping a new project and handing it to a new employee. They spend extra time and energy explaining tasks that they thought needed no explication once converted to code and relayed via APIs. Workers pay a disproportionately higher price: they lose their time, even their paychecks, with no opportunity to appeal any mistreatment. Many of the transaction costs passed on to requesters irror those shouldered by workers. Each hurdle faced demonstrates that ghost work isn't working smoothly for anyone involved.

[...] Requesters overwhelmingly expected workers to have their own software tools to bring to the job [...] A full-time employee would be given all the software tools necessary to do his or her job. But in the on-demand labor setting, this cost is transferred to the workers. [...] Requesters can improve their bottom line, since they don't have to provide software tools for on-demand workers.

Because platforms get their revenue from the requeters, it is not surprising that they, intentionally or not, confer more market power to requesters. Platforms also have the power to unilaterally decide who does and doesn't hjave access to their platform. [...]

One of the challenges for those doing ghost work is that there's no agreement about the social status or baggage that comes with it. Is it a dead-end trap, no different from the piecework of the first decades of the last century, or a hip gig that ggives someone the ultimate flexibility? People who've decided to pursue ghost work presumably did so after weighing the costs and benefits. They decided, at least for the immediate future, that ghost work was a better option. Their decisions hinged on both what they valued more than money and on taking stock of what "regular jobs" look like in their lives. Their job prospects reflect the growing and sobering reality of what is available to working-age adults around the globe.

What seems straightforward to many Westerners is often a hurdle for workers in India, where people's homes often lack a formal address. This was the case for Joseph. Unable to offer a postal address that satisfied MTurk's requirements, he bought an account for an agency and used its address - a common work-around. Shortly after Joseph bought that account, it, too, got suspended, likely because the address didn't match his government-issued identification. The third time Joseph tried to get an account, he bought one on Facebook. As he put it, "I found a person on Facbeook who was from Thrissur [a city two hours away], but he does not work on it [MTurk] anymore. I work using his account and give him 20 percent of my salary."

For instance, Anand, 24, is a student working on MTurk and living with his parents in Chennai. Anand uses his income from MTurk to pay for personal expenses. He told us that his parents don;'t understand what he is doing in front of the computer so much, but he hopes to prove them wrong by eventually getting a formal position with Amazon.com. [...]

[...] Doordash offers a same-day pay feature, called Fast Pay, that lets Dashers cash out earnings, much like Amazon Payments lets workers draw their pay into a direct deposit account. Fast Pay charges $1.99 to cash out. [...]

FIX 9: UNIONS AND PLATFORM COOPERATIVES AS THE NEW BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU

We need a third-party registry that allows on-demand workers to build their work resumes and accrue reputations, independent of the platform. Workers should be able to take their record of accomplishments with them, no matter where they pick up their next gig. Unlike a typical resume, a registry, managed by workers' representatives, would allow workers to display validated feedback from previous employers and requesters, no matter the platform of origin. Platforms could be required to post this portable stack of letters of recommendation as part of the worker's platform-specific profile. These registries could operate as the on-demand economy's Better Business Bureau, authenticating workers' identities and reputations and saving companies the engineering costs curretnly poured into blocking the relatively few bad actors bombarding platforms with shoddy or fradulent work. In exchange for bringing greater scrutiny for workers' reputations, registries could be used to hold companies accountable to workers' demands. For example, companies could be required to register suspensions and removals of workers.