On this episode, Chad sits down with Adam Roseman, CEO of Steady, to discuss the importance of income stability in the gig economy. Chad and Adam talk about the challenges gig workers face with finding a steady income and how to overcome those obstacles. Adam also shares his inspiration for starting Steady and his unique comparison of the impact of the gig economy to the personalities from the movie Love Actually!
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From the Episode
Chad: So you have a really unique perspective, as a platform who works with independent contractors, but also with W2 employees who are working multiple part time jobs, and I think you kind of look at it as, maybe agnostic, just from an income perspective, and that’s probably how the worker looks at it, as more of just from an income perspective. And I’m curious, just from your unique vantage point, how do you see W2, part time, and contingent work intersecting? And what does that future of work look like to you, when you think of those two components – W2 part time versus contingent work?
Adam: Sure, so I am a big believer that the lines are going to blur overtime, and I think one of the most obvious examples of that is if you look at how people are actually working. So today, let’s just say you’re a part time worker at Walmart, or at Home Depot. You work there, there’s no, sort of, minimum threshold of hours that you really need to work, because they always have a challenging time, sort of, filling shifts. And, you know, depending on which brand of retail you’re working for, every couple of weeks you have the ability to log on to the scheduling platform, whether it be Kronos or others, and you grab the shifts that you want to work until they fill up and then once they fill up then you have to pick other shifts, and you go and you work in a retail environment based on the shifts you selected. And then you sort of flip that over to someone like an Instacart: you’re working for Instacart, which we all consider to be a good platform, what do you do when you’re working for Instacart? Well, every week or two depending on you Geo, you go onto instacart when the shifts open, you book your shifts, and then you go and you show up at a retail environment. And so, the app was your initial entry point into instacart, but the mechanism of work is really no different. And so from our perspective, there is absolutely no doubt that the lines are going to continue to blur. I am not an expert, by any means, in terms of sort of the legal ramifications or challenges associated with that blur, be it, you know, a W2 or contract worker. You know, the way that our workers look at it is, as you talked about, yes, is very income centered, but all of them also understand that, you know, when you are a 1099 or contract worker, there’s going to be additional things that you need to think about, such as, you know, taxes and insurance and other things that may not be provided to you, that you’re going to be able to achieve through W2. But they’re, from our perspective, just given that you have, sort of, technology first gig platforms that are creating an offline, real world experience combined with offline, physical presence, real world experience-first businesses that are becoming more and more technology enabled to enable them to match labor supply and demand and effectively Uberize, you know, I think the lines between those two very distinct set of businesses in most people’s minds are going to become very very narrow over the course of the next decade.