‘Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work’ (Zone Books, 2026) is an illuminating study of service jobs. As a professor of English, Annie McClanahan comes at the topic from a fresh angle, interweaving analysis of sit-coms, poetry and novels into a hard-headed understanding of the political economy of service work.
Perhaps the most important point McClanahan makes is that the hourly wage, which many of us assume to be the ‘standard’ wage form under capitalism, is in fact anything but. Tips, piece-rate wages and gigs have been “the abiding and enduring tendencies of wage labour under capitalism”; the hourly wage with stable contractual terms emerged in the highly specific conditions of mass production and Fordist assembly lines in the 20th century, and has been in decline in the global north as the locus of manufacturing has shifted to East Asia. Even in its heyday, US regulators carved out exceptions so that the more feminised and racialised service employers did not have to provide their workers employment protections.
Being paid for your time makes sense from a capitalist perspective in the context of factories where standardisation in the quantity and quality of output is desirable. For service work, that has never been the case: McClanahan quotes historian Leonard Schwarz who found that domestic servants in the 18th and 19th century were paid ‘board wages’ and had “no legal time of their own”. While board wages may be a fringe notion today, the idea of paying workers based on their output rather than for their time has not only survived into the 21st century, it has been reinvigorated in the context of digital technology.
McClanahan hones in on the microworkers of Amazon Mechanical Turk to examine the deskilling and outsourcing which algorithmic management has facilitated for clerical work. These workers are paid per-task completed rather than for their time because, although their work has been deskilled and standardised like in a factory, in microwork “the quantity of the output is more variable than the quality.” Microworkers can be called upon on-demand, and go unpaid for time between completing tasks, because they typically work at home behind their laptop or phone, and therefore the costs of work is outsourced to the worker, while the employer can also draw on a global supply of labour to select from to complete tasks, keeping wages at rock-bottom.
Indeed, a big theme of ‘Beneath the Wage’ is that the introduction of new technologies in service work is less about productivity and more about control over the labour force. Service jobs have always been resistant to the sort of leaps forward in productivity that have occurred periodically in the manufacturing industry. This leads managers to rely on “labour intensification” as the primary means of squeezing more out of service workers.
Take Uber as a case in point. The key technologies deployed by the platform have not fundamentally transformed the nature of taxi driving or delivery work. They are tools for increasing informational efficiency; to surveil workers, to punish them, or to provide incentives. As McClanahan put its, Uber’s tech “has been used to preserve the fiction of gig workers’ independence while simultaneously ensuring ever-greater levels of technological subordination.”
Does this mean that drivers and riders would be better off as employees, paid an hourly wage? McClanahan has a nuanced perspective. In the final chapter, she examines this issue via gig economy-themed literature (who knew so many novels had been written about gig workers?) which emphasise the importance of “spatial movement” to what it feels like to be a rider or a driver on the road.
McClanahan finds that real contradictions exist between, on the one hand, a desire from gig workers for freedom and flexibility which finds some resonance in how it feels to be a rider cycling through the streets of a major metropolis, and, on the other hand, the equally real sensation of algorithmic control and subordination which many gig workers articulate as a form of “modern-day slavery”. She makes the case for escaping a doomed binary whereby “the promise of freedom from control could appear only as the ideology of gigwork ('be your own boss'), while the critique of gigwork as racialised exploitation (’modern-day slavery') could be registered only as a demand for greater regulatory and managerial control.”
Positing more utopian horizons is never a bad thing: there’s little doubt that the employment classification debate is really an argument over which of two forms of labour exploitation are preferable. Nonetheless, employment status remains a key strategic question for the labour movement, one that can’t be side-stepped. Our argument is simple: drivers and riders have more power as employees than as bogus self-employed, and there will be no worker liberation without power.
What is very useful about ‘Beneath the Wage’ is that it challenges us to think about the gig economy in its proper context: as just the latest incarnation of service work in a long history under capitalism, one that has seen waves of technological change, all of which have subjected service workers to deskilling and labour intensification. We should perhaps spend less time dwelling on what's different and new about the gig economy and instead focus more on how persistent certain forms of capitalist exploitation have proven to be.
The book left us dwelling on this - perhaps disturbing - question: if the anomaly in the history of capitalism is the formalised, time-based wages associated most of all with manufacturing work, should service workers who are currently paid for their time not be looking over their shoulder, wondering when they too may be compelled to enter the ranks of the gig economy?
Ben Wray, Gig Economy Project co-ordinator
