The Uberization Of Nursing Sees The Usual Problems For Gig Workers, But Here Comes ‘Uber For Armed Guards’ Anyway

Business Models

from the includes-motorcade dept

Uber has only been around for 15 years, but its underlying business model of on-demand labor, organized online, has been applied widely around the world in many industries. That’s despite concerns that gig workers get a raw deal, since they do the same work as employees, but without the protections and benefits the latter enjoy. In some countries, this has led to courts ruling that gig workers are in fact employees. A brief from the Roosevelt Institute provides a fascinating look at the Uberization of nursing in the US. An unsatisfactory Uber ride is one thing, but if gig nursing leads to sub-standard medical care, the consequences are potentially life-threatening:

On-demand nursing companies such as CareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed have promised hospitals more control and nurses more flexibility. Through original interviews with 29 “gig” nurses and nursing assistants, this brief finds that these apps encourage nurses to work for less pay, fail to provide certainty about scheduling and the amount or nature of work, take little to no accountability for worker safety, and can threaten patient well-being by placing nurses in unfamiliar clinical environments with no onboarding or facility training.

Nurses who are gig workers must not only spend time dealing with the online negotiation process, they are also encouraged to bid against each other:

On ShiftKey, Ashley [a 31-year-old certified nursing assistant in rural Pennsylvania] not only expresses her availability for a shift but bids for one against peers by indicating the lowest hourly rate for which she will work. To win the shift, she lowers and lowers her rate until it’s well below a living wage. Like other gig workers who spend a considerable amount of work time not being paid, Ashley is not paid for the time she spends each month updating her profile, reviewing available positions, bidding for shifts, and sending messages in the app about errors in her wages. Some days, she says, ShiftKey feels like a race to the bottom.

Even when an on-demand nurse is matched with a shift at a hospital, there is a risk that the shift will be cancelled:

If a hospital cancels her shift more than two hours before the start time, CareRev does not compensate her at all. If the cancellation is closer to the planned start time, she sometimes earns two to four hours of what she was supposed to have earned if she worked the entire shift. Hospitals may also shorten shifts while a nurse is on the job; in these cases, the app does not pay the nurse for any of the unworked hours. (Of course, nurses are not paid for any unexpected additional hours they may work.) If Dana [a 29-year-old nurse in St. Louis, Missouri] were to cancel a shift at the last minute or leave in the middle of a shift, she would be penalized. Her attendance rating would dip, which would negatively impact her access to future shifts or the app itself.

On the plus side, the Roosevelt analysis notes that the rates offered for gig nursing are higher than those for regular employment in the sector. Gig nursing also provides flexibility, which is important for some workers. But on-demand nurses not only lose many protections of local, state and federal laws on minimum wages, overtime pay, retirement benefits and health insurance, they must give up some of their privacy:

Workers must also agree to be tracked on their smartphones to clock in and clock out at facilities, and to keep their location tracker on while en route to a facility. Some workers expressed frustrations about not getting full pay for shifts worked if the internet or cell service in a specific area is weak or prevents them from logging into the app and officially beginning their workday.

Despite the well-documented problems across many industries, the gig worker model is still being tried in new areas. Here, for example, is Protector, a service that hopes to do for armed guards what Uber did for taxis:

Protector’s guards are active duty or recently retired law enforcement, each of whom has government-issued permits to carry firearms and work as a guard. Hiring a security detail on Protector will cost users at least $1,000 for a minimum of five hours, plus a $129 annual membership fee.

According the app, you can choose the uniform the armed guards will wear, and there’s a motorcade thrown in too. But as the TechCrunch article notes:

Protector’s target customer is unclear, since it’s difficult to imagine what kind of person would be on board with paying over $1,000 for such an ostentatious, unnecessary service. Perhaps as another tactic to boost engagement, Protector has made appeals to a highly specific audience: business executives who are concerned about their safety after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (who would likely have access to corporate security anyway).

As well as being something of a niche offering, Protector differs from other on-demand labor services in one important respect. If on-demand nurses are unhappy with their shift, or how they have been treated in a hospital, there’s not much they can do about it. But do you really want to deal with a stranger who is angry about some aspect of their gig with you when when you know that they are armed?

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Filed Under: employees, flexibility, gig workers, guns, healthcare, hospitals, law enforcement, nurses, on-demand, security, tracking, uber
Companies: CareRev, Clipboard Health, Protector Security Solutions, ShiftKey, ShiftMed