Andrew Guerin

So there are a lot of gig workers who don't make a lot of money and policymakers, just like they want other sorts of low wage workers to be able to afford a decent living in an expensive city, want the same for gig workers.

So a city like Seattle that's been at the frontier of raising minimum wage laws was concerned that these laws don't apply to gig workers who are self-employed.

They're not employees of any company formally, so the minimum wage doesn't apply to them.

Seattle was a leader in trying to extend minimum pay laws to the gig economy by putting in regulations that ensured that for every delivery you do, you earn a certain amount in base pay, that that's either above a fixed minimum or some formula based on how far and how long you're driving and doing the job.

And so at the start of 2024, this went into effect and we wanted to see, okay,

How much better off is this making the drivers, focusing on most of the drivers who've been doing it pretty frequently beforehand and will continue to drive into that kind of post-reform period?

Yeah.

And so what we did first, in what sense did they not make more money?

We got data from this company called Gridwise.

It's an app that they make for gig workers who can link all their various gig economy apps to this one central app that tracks their earnings.

And we were able to get...

and get access to that data for research purposes, which lets us look at people who were in Seattle as delivery drivers beforehand and people in other parts of Washington state who were delivery drivers who were defected by this law.

And we were able to see what was happening to their gig economy earnings, delivery in particular, before and after this reform to see, OK, how are things evolving for the Seattle delivery drivers relative to a comparison group?

And what we found is that there was one month where these drivers were earning more.

And then afterwards, at least on a monthly basis, they were earning exactly the same as the control group, which is basically to say the same as they were before the reform.

And we thought, OK, did we just screw this up?

Are we looking at the data wrong?

And so we broke it down to its components.

And what we saw is that it wasn't a mistake.

Actually, you see everything moving the way it should be moving, which is that when you look at how much they're getting paid for each delivery, that is jumping in Seattle, just like it's supposed to.