For the past nine years, Mandolin Noir has taken care of other people’s pets around Seattle, often working through companies like Rover and Wag. The work is steady; she visits the dogs when their owners are at work, and checks in on the cats when owners travel out of town. But in the past week, she’s faced a cascade of cancelations. Her clients who work for Amazon and Zillow have been asked by their employers to stay home because of Covid-19, and vacations have been canceled. Now Noir is trying to find a full-time job—no easy task when half of Seattle is shut down and, as the local health department said on Tuesday, the disease is “spreading more rapidly” in the county.
“Suddenly all of my work has disappeared,” she says. “I have enough money to pay bills through next month and that’s it.”
As coronavirus infections multiply across the country, and particularly in Seattle, “gig economy” workers are again learning that they are on their own. Ahmed Mumin is the executive director of the Seattle Rideshare Drivers Association, which represents 700 local drivers. He says rides are down about 50 percent compared to a normal week, as major local employers like Amazon and Microsoft urge their workers to stay home. “The drivers are very anxious about that,” he says. There’s worry about making rent, paying phone bills, and filling prescriptions. “Really don’t know what I’m gonna do to make money as this is my full-time gig,” one local driver wrote on Reddit.
Beyond the lost income, Mumin says drivers carry the additional worry that comes with a virus that has infected at least 190 local people and killed 22. “For a full-time driver, it would be easy to pick up 15 to 20 people during daily shift,” he says. “You can see why drivers are very worried that the next person they give a ride to has the disease.”
For the app-based “gig economy” companies like Uber, Lyft, Rover, and Instaca