Introduction

Tyree Joseph, 21 years old, works part-time delivering food for Uber Eats. From the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx, he often commutes into Manhattan before turning on the Uber Eats app for the day, since he can earn more money there. Like many young adults trying to make ends meet during the pandemic, Tyree increased the number of hours working for Uber Eats because he felt it came with lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than working in a brick-and-mortar retail store, and because he saw rising demand for food delivery. But while the app pays just enough for him to stay on top of his bills, it does not pay enough to allow him to save for the future. On a good day he can earn around $100, but on a bad day he can earn as little as $30, which is not enough for him to stay afloat. Even more important, the lack of certainty around how much he is going to make each day and the need to constantly hustle just to keep up leaves Tyree with no time to pursue his lifelong passion, which is to work with trains.

Tyree is one of millions of gig workers who find work through app-based platforms. Like many of his peers, he would prefer to be working in another occupation, but is not sure how to make a career change and lacks the time to research this and come up with a plan. Helping people like Tyree who are underemployed or unemployed get on a career pathway is the purpose of our public workforce system. This federally funded system includes a national network of nearly 2,400 American Job Centers (AJC), including one in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, just west of Soundview. The job center could provide Tyree with access to services like career counseling and training opportunities that would prepare him for a well-paying career working with trains. Yet Hunts Point Career Center staff are unaware of Tyree, and Tyree does not know about the Hunts Point Career Center or how it could help him. Indeed, he works so much that he lacks time to investigate what career services are available in his community.

Our public workforce system does not serve gig workers well, in large part because it was not designed with them in mind. Congress last reauthorized the legislation governing our public workforce system by passing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) in 2014. The gig economy was still fairly new then. While the law sought to expand data on people who are self-employed and to help people interested in transitioning to self-employment, it does not specifically account for the gig workforce or provide these workers with robust, targeted assistance to help them make career transitions or access professional development opportunities. In fact, Randall Eberts of the Upjohn Institute has found that people in nonstandard work arrangements are often at a disadvantage compared to traditional workers when seeking assistance from WIOA’s Adult and Dislocated Worker programs, because those programs are focused on serving traditional workers and on preparing jobseekers for traditional employment.¹ A 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that serving gig workers often presents a challenge for workforce boards.²

In this paper I explore how the workforce system is currently serving gig workers, how it can better assist gig workers in achieving their long-term career goals, and what barriers stand in the way. I then offer seven policy recommendations for addressing those barriers. This paper is part of a larger project examining the experiences of app-based gig workers, including to what extent they are able to pursue their long-term goals and what role our workforce development and higher education systems should play in helping them.³

To understand how the workforce system currently serves gig workers and the challenges they face in doing so, I conducted structured interviews with workforce development officials, workforce board leaders, and workforce development professionals in two cities (San Francisco and Long Beach), one region (Chicago and Cook County), as well as two states (Missouri and Massachusetts). Through those interviews, I identified a number of ways in which our workforce development system does not map neatly onto the gig workforce, which makes up a significant portion of the labor force. New America also conducted focus groups to hear directly from gig workers and freelancers who use app-based platforms to find work, which is how I met Tyree. (A report on these focus groups and the insights they yielded is forthcoming.)