Projects

Bridging the Negotiation: Reducing UnpaidWork with Freelancers and Clients Gig platforms support large amounts of online knowledge work. Many have argued for designing worker-centered gig platforms to support better work conditions, particularly reducing transaction costs for workers. With the existing power asymmetries between freelancers and clients, freelancers have limited abilities to negotiate work conditions with clients. To understand how to better support workers in negotiating work conditions and reduce unpaid work with client buy-ins, we look to conduct participatory designs with freelancers and clients from Upwork, initiated by surveying their perceptions on fair work conditions. We look to provide insights on freelancers’ perceptions on unpaid work, clients’ perceptions toward worker conditions, and their ideals of a fair work arrangement. From this, we propose a prototype that aims to support workers in negotiating work conditions with clients, and inform clients about the components of a task in the job they are hiring for. Our work provides an alternative view in designing worker-centered online workplaces addressing stakeholders’ competing interests. (In prep.)

Gig Diversity: Gendered Gig Work Recent studies on gig work has focused on a male dominant narrative in understanding workers’ experiences, especially in location-dependent contexts such as ride-hailing, food delivery, and home services. Extending the prior work on bias in gig platforms, I focused on women gig workers’ unique perspectives facing bias and harassment in these platforms, we interviewed 20 women gig workers and found that women who are less financially dependent on the platform and more confident in masculine environments are better able to manage bias and harassment. Yet, women who do not fit these unwritten requirements are left having to brush off bias and harassment experiences as they occur. Over the long term, they engage in invisible labor to overcome them by seeking support from men allies and strategically altering the way they dress and present themselves. This research takes a critical gender perspective in interpreting workers’ experiences and highlights the importance of attending to gender-focused designs in gig platforms. (Submitted)

Gig Workers’ Social Resilience under Covid-19 The Covid-19 pandemic has made a great impact in the gig work sector, at the same time proven it is essential. It is important to understand how workers in different social contexts cope with the pandemic, particularly those who are from rural and marginalized communities. I interviewed 14 workers and collected weekly diary entries for 10 weeks between July - October of 2020. This work highlighted the vulnerabilities of rural U.S. gig workers in coping with new work situations and recovering from the labor market change catalyzed by the pandemic. Future work needs to attend to the unique challenges facing rural gig workers – the lack of alternative work opportunities and limited infrastructures affect their ability to avoid health risks and become marginalized by the platform. (Under revision)

Unpacking the Promise of Sharing Economy in Local Communities Literature in the sharing economy had gone through a transition from the initial optimism highlighting the promise of the exchange to the increasing concerns of the unfettered “gigification” of work. This transition of understanding underlies an unclear definition between the term “sharing” versus “gig” when they are often used interchangeably. To further unpack these definitions, I investigated carpool activities in local communities – which both embody the promise of sharing and support the format of a ride-hailing service like Uber. Between March to December of 2019, I observed and participated in 42 rides (1 - 4 hours long per ride, 5 times as a driver), and interviewed 17 participants from two carpool communities, I found that the community members’ common background as professionals or students, and their shared instrumental needs in getting to a place from the same neighborhood contributed to more respectful interactions, the tendency in co-production and sustained relationships through carpooling. This work highlighted the form of mediation, and customer’s investment in facilitating the exchange affects their behavior and expectations in a sharing activity.

Ning F Ma and Benjamin V Hanrahan. 2020. Unpacking Sharing in the Peer-to-Peer Economy: The Impact of Shared Needs and Backgrounds on Ride-Sharing. Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2020). Minneapolis, MN, USA.

What does it Mean to Part-time in Gig Platforms? Ride-sharing companies have been reshaping the structure and practice of ride-hailing work. At the same time,studies have been showing mixed driver experiences on the platform while many of the drivers are workingpart-time. In this research, we seek to understand why drivers on this platform are working part-time, howthis impacts their view of the platform, and what this means for more accurately evaluating the design of theseplatforms. To investigate this question, we focused on situating ride-sharing in the lives and constellation ofgigs that drivers maintain. We collected 53 survey responses and conducted 10 semi-structured interviewswith drivers to probe these questions. We found that the extent that drivers categorize themselves as part-timeis less about the number of hours worked and more about how dependent they are on ride-sharing income.The level of this dependency seemed to heavily influence how they interacted with the platform and theirattitudes towards difficulties faced. It seemed to us that in some ways that the design or functioning of theplatform almost pushed users towards working part-time. We discuss the importance of taking these differenttypes of workers and their situations into consideration when evaluating the design and usability of theseplatforms.

Ning F Ma and Benjamin V Hanrahan. 2019. Part-Time Ride-Sharing: Recognizing the Context in which Drivers Ride-Share and its Impact on Platform Use. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, GROUP, Article 247 (December 2019), 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3361128

What is at Stake for Uber Drivers? Uber is a ride-sharing platform that is part of the ‘gig-economy,’ where the platform supports and coordinates a labormarket in which there are a large number of ephemeral, piece-meal jobs. Despite numerous efforts to understand the impactsof these platforms and their algorithms on Uber drivers, how tobetter serve and support drivers with these platforms remainsan open challenge. In this paper, we frame Uber through thelens of Stakeholder Theory to highlight drivers’ position in theworkplace, which helps inform the design of a more ethicaland effective platform. To this end, we analyzed Uber drivers’forum discussions about their lived experiences of workingwith the Uber platform. We identify and discuss the impactof the stakes that drivers have in relation to both the Ubercorporation and their passengers, and look at how these stakesimpact both the platform and drivers’ practices.

Ning F Ma, Chien Wen Yuan, Moojan Ghafurian, and Benjamin V Hanrahan. 2018. Using Stakeholder Theory to Examine Drivers’ Stake in Uber. Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2018). Montreal, Canada.