雅思阅读 170: The Illusion of Flexible Work（弹性工作的幻象）

改编自 Frontiers in Sociology / Trades Union Congress / Human Rights Watch。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1804777/full

Reading Passage

A. Ride-hailing platforms long promised a golden bargain: drivers would be their own bosses, choosing when, where and how long to work, free from the rigid schedules of conventional employment. In advertisements and investor pitches, the gig economy was sold as liberation — a pocket-sized business that anyone could run from a car seat. A decade on, researchers are painstakingly dismantling that picture. Interview studies conducted in cities as different as London, Helsinki, St Petersburg and Johannesburg show that while some drivers genuinely value the freedom, the lived reality for many is closer to surveillance than to self-employment. The relationship between driver and platform is mediated almost entirely by an app that dispenses rides, adjusts prices, reviews performance and, at a stroke, can deactivate a worker with little explanation. The "independent contractor" label, once a selling point, now looks to many scholars like a device for shifting every risk of the business — accidents, illness, idle hours, vehicle costs — from the company onto the person behind the wheel. The driver pays for the car, its fuel, its insurance and its repairs; when the app goes quiet, there is no waiting day, no sick pay, no severance. In this sense the gig economy did not so much create a new kind of work as strip out the protections that earlier bargains had attached to old kinds of work.

B. The clearest evidence concerns pay. A 2025 field investigation conducted in Texas by Human Rights Watch found that surveyed gig workers earned nearly 30 percent below the federal minimum wage and roughly 70 percent below what an independent estimate considered a living wage for the state. A separate British analysis of Uber's pricing mechanics reached a striking conclusion about how little of the fare actually reaches the driver. Although the company had long advertised a nominal 25 percent commission, dynamic and personalised pricing meant that drivers frequently retained only 50 to 60 percent of what passengers paid; across all trips the median driver kept just 71 percent, and fewer than half retained three-quarters or more. Where pay fell, drivers in the European comparative study responded not by working less but by working longer, compensating for declining earnings with additional hours — a strategy that traded financial stress for physical exhaustion and family time.

C. Woven into the pay dispute is a second, quieter grievance: information. Drivers repeatedly report that the platform withholds key details of a trip — its full route, its exact surge multiplier, the criteria by which rides are allocated — until after the fact. This asymmetry matters because the algorithm that distributes work is, to the driver, a black box. Workers perceive that it favours newer drivers, punishes them unpredictably and can cut them off without appeal. The result is not merely discontent but a kind of alienation: people labouring for an employer they never meet, evaluated by rules they cannot see, and dismissed by a system that offers no human to argue with. Curiously, comparative interviews found that drivers were less anxious about being watched than about the underlying power imbalance over pay and conditions; the surveillance itself was tolerable, they seemed to say, if only the terms behind it were fair. The algorithm also sets the rate at which prices surge, and drivers suspect it nudges them to wait for fares they would never have accepted if they had seen the whole number in advance. Every trip, in effect, is priced by an unseen negotiator who never has to explain itself.

D. This is why drivers' attitudes toward regulation are stubbornly divided. Many interviewed drivers support formal rules, but for precisely the flexibility the platforms tout: they want safety protections, fairer earnings, relief from market oversaturation, access to pensions and a formal process to contest an unfair deactivation. A substantial group, however, remains wary. They suspect that converting them into conventional employees would bring the very constraints they value most — fixed shifts, mandatory schedules, managers breathing down their necks. Industry surveys give some force to that fear: when couriers in one trial were reclassified as employees, a majority of those who felt worse off cited the loss of schedule autonomy, and half said they had no intention of staying in formal employment long term. In Chile and Mexico, drivers estimated they would need their pay to more than double before they would voluntarily swap platform work for a traditional job.

E. The policy problem, then, is not simply one of exploitation or of freedom, but of a difficult middle. Drivers do not, by and large, want the rigidities of old-fashioned employment; nor can most of them afford the insecurity that pure "flexibility" now imposes. Regulation that treats them as employees risks destroying the scheduling freedom that drew them in; regulation that leaves them as contractors leaves accidents, illness and old age entirely on their shoulders. The most thoughtful recent studies conclude that the terms of platform work are, in effect, a social determinant of health — that worsening conditions are not inevitable, but neither are they self-correcting. Somewhere between a company that owns nothing but an app and a worker who owns nothing but a car, societies will have to decide which risks belong to whom. The gig economy did not invent insecurity; it merely packaged it as freedom, and the harder task now is to unpackage it. Anyone who drives for one of these platforms is, in the meantime, running a small business with exactly one employee, one vehicle and no one to call when it breaks down. Whether that arrangement is a ladder of opportunity or a trap, the data so far suggest it is neither the liberation nor the exploitation alone that its loudest defenders and loudest critics describe.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. What the pay numbers actually show ii. The history of the taxi industry iii. A black box: information withheld from drivers iv. How ride-hailing apps calculate speed v. Why drivers are divided over being regulated vi. The design of self-driving cars vii. A difficult middle between freedom and protection

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. How did drivers in the European study respond to falling pay? A. They stopped working immediately. B. They worked longer hours to compensate. C. They demanded higher fares in person. D. They switched to office jobs.

6. What did the British pricing analysis find about commissions? A. Drivers always kept exactly 75 percent. B. Dynamic pricing meant drivers often retained only half to 60 percent. C. The company never took any commission. D. Drivers kept more than passengers paid.

7. What do drivers find most stressful about the algorithm? A. The physical act of driving. B. The power imbalance over pay and the rules they cannot see. C. Having to learn coding. D. Being forced to work outdoors.

8. Why are some drivers wary of being reclassified as employees? A. They would lose the schedule flexibility they value. B. Employees are paid less. C. They would have to pay tax. D. They dislike pensions.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The 2025 Texas investigation found gig workers earned below the federal minimum wage.
10. Drivers in the comparative study were more worried about being watched than about pay.
11. Every driver interviewed wanted immediate conversion to traditional employment.
12. In Chile and Mexico, drivers said they would need more than double their pay to switch to a traditional job.
13. Most gig drivers own expensive electric vehicles.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Many drivers support regulation to gain pensions and a fair process for contesting (14) __________, while others fear that formal employment would remove the (15) __________ they value.

答案与解析

← 上一篇 | 返回雅思焦点 | 下一篇 →