Alfred the app helps with your most menial tasks – but consider the real cost

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/16/alfred-app-sharing-economy-poor-work

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Smartphones at the ready: TechCrunch has given Alfred, an outsourcing app for your most menial tasks, its Disrupt Cup – an award that recognises the best new start-ups. Alfred is apparently “the first service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services”. There’s no precise translation for such unabashed jargon but, essentially, much like TaskRabbit, Alfred appears to be a butler service, with payment starting at a paltry $25 (£15.40) a week. Naturally it compares itself to that other giant of the sharing economy, the taxi service Uber.

If we’re defining social progress by the ease with which the well-off can have their dry cleaning collected and delivered, then, of course, this is a step forward. But in terms of employment rights and fairness, the sharing economy, with its atomisation of tasks and roles, is anything but. If you have an iPhone for a boss, and are reduced to carrying out small tasks for small amounts of money on an ad hoc basis, you can kiss goodbye to any hope of employment rights. The government has held up the rise in people registering as self-employed – the biggest factor behind the fall in unemployment figures – as a triumph of its austerity policies, but this merely shows the decrease in the amount of secure work available for people who are desperate to make ends meet.

Last week, Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, warned that Britain was becoming a Downton Abbey society, with the gap growing between the richest and poorest, and few political barriers in place to stop this. If Peter Mandelson was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, the actions of the coalition in the past few years suggest they’re intensely excited about the same prospect.

Class prejudice was becoming more acceptable, O’Grady warned: “We are piling yet more riches on to a privileged few. Economic growth is back but there’s no sign of it in most workers’ pay packets. In fact, the gap has got worse. Top chief executives now earn 175 times the wages of the average worker.”

Research from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission bears this out: far from becoming a meritocracy, Britain’s professions are still a closed shop for those from more impoverished social backgrounds. Sex and gender discrimination employment tribunals are at a record low as a result of the coalition introducing costs, which directly affect the poorest. The gender pay gap actually increased in 2013, with women disproportionately represented in the lowest paid, most precarious jobs, and black and ethnic minority workers still massively underrepresented in the upper strata of all professions. Last week, for instance, it was reported that only 3.7% of top tier civil service employees are from an ethnic minority.

When I moved house a little while ago, a friend suggested using another service in the sharing economy – the delivery auction website, AnyVan. You post up the amount of stuff you need to move, where it’s going from and to, and people bid for the job. Initially the bids constitute decent pay for decent work. Then, quite quickly, they fall to ludicrously low levels, as people in dire need of money scrabble for a job that will only net them a pound or two of profit. It’s desperate, but still lucrative for the company running the whole show.

With the increased precarity of the workplace, it’s no surprise productivity is still worryingly low. The growth of apps that deregulate work, and offer no pension, sick pay, security or even, in some cases, safety, does nothing to stop the march towards a Britain where barely anyone can rely on a regular income, and no one has a professional identity or sense of worth that derives from their work.

If you’re financially sorted, but a little bit lazy, it can be tempting to outsource your more banal chores. Who really enjoys cleaning the bathroom? But by lauding these apps, which make life a tiny bit easier for the “time poor” and a lot harder for the “poor poor”, the poorest lose out – and so does the economy.