!!!!! “Today was good because I did not have to pee in a bottle.”
So VICE just launched this new series called “How I Get By,” and the latest installment, A Week in the Life of an Amazon Delivery Driver, caught my eye because the Twitter excerpt highlighted how the driver, as a black man, worries a lot about the optics of driving around in unmarked white vans. It struck me as an underrated dimension to the rigors of a kind of job that we’ve all been hearing and hand-wringing about a lot (and that are disproportionately held by POC) — so for me, this piece raised the standard for all the ~this is what being a gig worker is like~ genre of discourse out there to a level that one doesn’t exactly see when, say, a white NYTimes reporter tries out a gig out for a day.
Not saying one approach is absolutely better than the other...but personally I do believe there’s always a little more to learn from, uh, the actual people who actually do the jobs?? Just my $0.02 against unnecessary gonzo journalism, that’s all.