After experimenting with most freelance marketplace platforms, Stockholm-based Lars, who is a writer and translator, settled on Fiverr in September 2021. In less than six months, he was earning a monthly profit of between $5,000 and $6,000 after the platform took its cut. Although he was working full-time to fulfill his clients’ demands, he was happy with how things were progressing.
Then in October, all Lars’ gig promotions were disabled, which meant he couldn’t pay the platform to promote his profile, and his income took a huge hit. “I was always at the top of Fiverr’s first search page before, then in the blink of an eye, all my gigs were at the bottom of the very last page,” explains Lars, who like all other gig workers in this story, spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “I have no bad public reviews, but I was told I was downgraded because of ‘quality issues.’” His monthly earnings have dropped by between $1,000 and $2,000.
He says that when he contacted Fiverr for support, they provided little reassurance. He was told not to worry, because rankings switch around all the time. “But that’s a lie—they are just gaslighting me and telling me it’s not true,” he says. “They couldn’t provide any more details on why they turned it off.”
Like many other workers in the gig economy, Lars is trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, at the beck and call of ever-changing user reviews, performance metrics, and opaque algorithms. Although this phenomenon of reputational insecurity isn’t new, it’s exacerbating an already tough economic environment for the expanding gig economy workforce. Workers of all kinds are turning to side hustles to cope with high levels of inflation. According to software technology company Qualtrics, 38 percent of American workers have looked for a second job, while another 14 percent are planning to do so, with parents particularly likely to be looking to cover the gaps. It’s a similar story in Europe—34 percent of UK-based workers have a second job, while 15 percent are set on securing one to make ends meet.
Amid a year of major and widespread layoffs in the tech industry, companies are turning to greater numbers of contractors and expanding their already extensive shadow workforce, instead of hiring and training permanent employees for vacant roles. In India, 65 percent of firms are employing gig workers to tackle a tech talent crunch. Much of this work is facilitated through digital labor platforms, where reputational insecurity is rife. Having already increased by 65 percent between 2016 and 2022, according to the Online Labour Index, the demand for online gig work is unlikely to slow anytime soon.
A study carried out across cities including London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Manila by researchers from the University of Bristol and Oxford University has found that the majority of gig economy workers feel under threat from feedback processes. And tech companies are only compounding the problem, leaving workers fearful for their future income and even more fiscally exposed amid the cost-of-living crisis.
The research, published in the journal Sociology in early November, found that seven in 10 gig economy freelancers providing services for some of the biggest digital labor platforms, including Fiverr and Upwork, are worried about unfair feedback and its negative effect on their future earnings. Faced with fickle review processes and volatile algorithms, work can feel like playing a game of whack-a-mole, while blindfolded. To cope, many workers are going above and beyond to keep getting work, from putting in extra hours without pay to doing entire jobs for free to avoid negative ratings.
“Most platforms create some form of control through ranking workers using metrics, which are often based on customer reviews or ratings—but workers don’t understand how it works, in what way the metrics are aggregated, how their ranking position is decided upon, and the consequences for their work,” explains Alex Wood, the article’s coauthor and a lecturer in Human Resource Management and Future of Work at Bristol Business School. “This is creating a growing trend of reputational insecurity—and platforms are really amplifying that insecurity.” In another study from 2021, Wood and his coauthors found that 62 percent of European gig workers worried about the effect of unfair feedback on their future income. Upwork , which uses a tool called Job Success Score (JSS) to rate freelancers, claims that this is not the only thing that informs the ranking algorithm, but clients do have the option to filter search results based on JSS. Upwork spokesperson Elisabeth Copper says freelancers are always welcome to post bids on job requests that match their skills and interests.
With limited channels for recourse if workers disagree with a client’s rating or want to understand more about algorithmic-generated decisions, workers are striving for perfection. Anything less and they risk seeing their ranking drop so low that they are unable to make a living. Many workers on Fiverr and Upwork carry out free supplementary work or give clients the option to pay less than the agreed amount in exchange for a five-star rating. In response to this, Upwork says it is a violation of its Terms of Use to ask for free work or to abuse the feedback system.
Fiverr spokesperson Laura Podesta says a freelancer’s ranking is contingent on a number of factors, not just their public star rating. “It includes their tenure on Fiverr, response rate to buyers (how long it takes them to respond to an inquiry), total amount of money made on Fiverr, delivery time (are they on time with order deadlines), and their star rating (how a buyer ranks them after an order delivery),” she says.
Although Podesta says that freelancers that have completed dozens of jobs will not have their overall ranking affected by a missed deadline or one poor rating, Lars says he hasn’t had a day off since February of this year to avoid the risk. “The problem is that I don’t have a choice—this is just the standard of working full-time on Fiverr—don’t respond and you’re done,” says Lars. “Saying no too much will knock you down on the list, and if you go on vacation mode for a week, you have to spend several months rebuilding.” He says that his girlfriend now helps him with customer support, as he cannot juggle the delivery of work and responding to requests.
For workers based in the Global South, doing tasks for clients in the Global South, this kind of on-demand scheduling is even more pernicious. “In Manila, for example, per-hour wages might be higher than the city’s average, but the insecurity is much higher,” says Wood. “Dealing with customers on the other side of the world, they have to work nights to keep their customers happy—otherwise they’ll be rated for slow responses, as well as possible challenges around linguistic barriers.”
Even if workers do maintain good ratings on digital labor platforms, just one bad review can send them spiraling, taking months to resolve. Noa, who lives in Berlin and sells her services as a designer on Upwork, got her first review under 5, a 2.7, several months ago. “I suspect it was a client who expected much more than what he paid for,” explains Noa. “Although I did everything he asked, he complained to me that I missed a lot of the instructions, and yet he couldn’t share what those instructions were.”
Since the review, Noa says she hasn’t had a single enquiry for new business, when usually she’d receive five to ten messages a week. When she contacted support to find out more, she was told they couldn’t share any details. “It’s so frustrating because it makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong,” she says. “It’s knocked my confidence too, as clients are lowballing me now, and I’m just accepting their offers to scrub out the bad review.” Each week since the review, she estimates that she’s lost out on nearly $500 on one-off jobs from new clients.
“On digital platforms, customers are encouraged to rank workers, and they often don’t know how important that rating is,” says Wood. He believes tech companies should make customers aware that these systems are used to meter out disciplinary actions if workers are seen to be underperforming. “By giving somebody less than 5 out of 5, you’re saying you want them to be punished, that they deserve to have their ability to access work reduced, or be deactivated from the platform, basically fired,” says Wood.
This algorithmic control is not restricted to computer-based work—food delivery drivers, who are just as much at the will of this hidden numbers game, ask users to rate them five stars on their doorstep.
Rideshare drivers have to keep a close eye on the entire experience they offer to passengers. Amari, who lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and ended his three years of gig work at Doordash to drive for Uber and Lyft, began by considering the music he plays in his car. “I had to edit out most of the rap music because anything with a lot of cuss words and adult themes would inevitably make someone mad at me, and I got rated low for that,” he says.
He also makes sure to engage with passengers if they strike up a conversation. “Or if they’re quiet, I’ll leave it at hello,” he explains. “But in my three months with Uber, I’ve gathered up a few bad reviews and reports for politeness—the craziest thing is I couldn’t even tell you which customers it would have been.” Amari has no idea how this feedback will affect his ratings, but he knows that Uber deactivates drivers without warning if their ratings are too low or if the driver gets a lot of complaints.
Uber spokesperson Richard Foord said the company takes the decision to remove drivers from the platform very seriously. “We have robust processes in place to help ensure that we are taking a proportionate approach, which includes human-led investigations and case reviews,” says Foord. “Drivers are able to contact us if they have any concerns.”
However, Amari feels the system in place to find out details behind a rating is opaque and intentionally difficult to navigate. “There is no system set in place for us to know, so you could lose your job at any moment with no warning. I’ve concluded that Uber is pretty hostile towards its workers,” he says. As a way of cushioning what could be a sudden boot from the platform, Amari has found extra employment elsewhere, because he doesn’t feel driving for Uber full-time offers enough security.
While it’s useful for users to understand the impact of their low ratings, a change in this alone can’t solve the deepening issue of reputational insecurity and generalised insecurity in the gig economy. Research by the International Labour Organisation found that workers using location-based platforms, such as Uber, generate the bulk of their earnings from that source, while one third of online-platform workers relied primarily on this employment for their income, although this is far higher in developing countries. Until more robust regulation can tackle the systems so skewed against the people on which they depend, most workers have no choice but to continue striving to please their clients and the algorithms, as best they can.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
