Digital labor platform companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart are actively lobbying and marketing for a workplace that forces workers to accept jobs with only a sliver of the baseline rights and protections other workers have. To back their lobbying and marketing agenda, the companies have funded unscientific surveys, often using misleading questions, and cited the results as evidence that app-based workers are successful, profitable entrepreneurs when the reality is most are barely making ends meet.

This brief provides a roundup of more than a dozen scientific surveys of workers, voters, and taxpayers, as well as independent reviews of data supplied or required by law from “gig” companies, as defined above, on the wages and working conditions of digital labor platform jobs in the United States. We supplement those findings with community-based reports and the voices of workers themselves.