The Immigrants Fueling the Gig Economy

Editor’s Note: This article is the third in a series about how the gig economy is shaping the future of labor and what that means for workers.

Sakhr Sharafadin was making $8 an hour in the kitchen at a Little Caesars, during his senior year of high school, when friends started telling him about their work as Uber drivers and food deliverers for an app called Caviar. Though he’d been promoted to night manager just six months after he started at Little Caesars—the location’s youngest manager ever—the job had begun to feel like a dead end. As high-school graduation neared, he needed more money for his share of the rent, for books and tuition, and to pay for his car. When he was 15, he and his younger brother had arrived in Oakland, California, as immigrants from Yemen, leaving his mother back home in a country on the brink of war and joining his father, who worked behind the counter at a liquor store in San Leandro, California. Many of his friends were young immigrants like him, with lofty dreams for their futures. At 18 years old, Sharafadin was too young to drive for Uber (the company requires drivers to be twenty-one), but not too young for Caviar, so he downloaded the app and