Attempt to organise Airtasker Fails; Scabs rampant on Platform

In April 2024, I attempted to Unionise Airtasker. Airtasker is a gig economy platform that engages contractors to bid on customer's jobs advertised on the platform. As a former Airtasker worker, I know how bad the platform is. It is a race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions. A few years ago (in 2020) I wrote an as yet unpublished essay comparing Airtasker to the infamous "Bull System," of casual labour. As part of this essay, I screenshotted various examples of jobs completed on Airtasker withing about 6 months of each other, demonstrating that Airtasker is is practice a race to the bottom.

My investigation into Airtasker's standards exposed a completely unregulated market. Airtasker claims it is complying with its legal obligations, but it is clear to me that that are doing the bare minimum to cover their arses.

For example, I uncovered numerous instances of renumeration below the Award Rates of the time.  There was an example of 8 hours "Landscape Labouring," done for $150. There was a "Full days gardening work," completed for $120. There was a 9 hour shift cleaning up a building site done for $180. There was a customer advertising rates of $20 per hour, and he got it. There was a job where a 2 person team made a combine gross income of $240 for a total of 12 hours work ($12 per hour, per person).

Its worth remembering in these statistics that Airtasker calssifies its workers as contractors, meaning they do not get permanant conditions (paid annual leave, sick leave, etc), they do not get workcover provided, the do not even get superannuation. Airtasker provides some public liability insurance, but the worker has to pay the excess on it.

This is only a fraction of what I had collected.

While the "Fairwork Act Ammendment, Closing Loopholes," Bill introduced protections for most Gig Economy workers, the Guardian Reports that amendments secured by David Pocock are likely to exclude Airtasker workers. This means that if Airtasker is to be cleaned up, it will need to be the workers themselves to do it.

However, my experience suggests that Airtasker is riddled with scabs. in April, I had put up advertisements on the platform under a fake name encouraging workers to unionise. I went to the effort of securing a burner debit card, as I was concerned about giving Airtasker my payment details for this (as it turned out, Airtasker did not request my payment details until after I "accepted an offer, which I did not do for this purpose). I also used TOR to put the advertisements up. However, it was all in vein, as by the end of the first advertisements day, the number of scabs responding to it outnumered the supportive comments.

Another advertisement for the Union was posted a few days after this initial attempt, and was even more swamped by scabs. 

This seems to confirm the analysis that the very label of being a contractor indices a scab mentality in workers, at least when they are given an illusion of independence as their own boss. It is also likely that, as one commenter implied, the cost-of-living crisis is creating a layer of desperate workers willing to "work for peanuts."

This comment is consistent with the analysis that Meridith and Verity Burgmann provided of the Militance of the NSW BLF in the 1970s. The state; "The militancy, consequent upon a high degree of job security in a booming an inflationary economy..." (Meridith Burgman and Verity Burgmann (2017) Green Bans, Red Union, Newsouth Publishing. P13). It would appear that both the structure of Airtasker, along with prevailing economic conditions, are impeding attempts to Unionise the Platform.