Who Drives and Who Depends? Race, Platform Dependency, and the Stratification of Ride-Hail Labor

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Platform Work

Abstract

This paper examines racial stratification in ride-hail platform labor using nationally representative data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), pooled across four waves (2017–2020). While existing scholarship has established that racial minorities are overrepresented among gig workers, research has largely treated platform workers as a homogeneous category, obscuring critical variation in workers' structural relationship to the platform. I address this gap by constructing a three-category measure of ride-hail driver dependency—non-driver, low-dependency (supplemental income), and high-dependency (primary income)—and estimating a survey-weighted multinomial logistic regression to examine how race, food insecurity, and socioeconomic position predict sorting across these categories.

The central finding is that racial disparities in gig work intensify with platform dependency. Black respondents have roughly twice the odds of low-dependency driving but over five times the odds of high-dependency driving compared to White respondents, with similar escalation patterns for Hispanic and Asian respondents. Food insecurity powerfully predicts high-dependency driving but has no significant association with low-dependency driving, suggesting that survival-tier platform work is qualitatively distinct from supplemental gig labor. Counterintuitively, lower household income is associated with reduced odds of high-dependency driving, pointing to capital barriers that gate access to the platform itself.

Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, predatory inclusion, and platform dependence, I argue that ride-hail platforms do not merely reproduce racial inequality—they contain a hidden internal stratification between supplemental and survival work that is systematically organized along racial lines. This paper contributes to the sociology of precarious work by providing one of the first quantitative analyses showing that the distribution of platform dependency is itself racially structured, offering empirical support for critical theories of racialized platform labor.

Author

• Kevin Park, University of Toronto