The Gig Is Up

I've just finished the book Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler. I don't have the book in front of me, but I believe the author had been writing shorter pieces about the gig economy for several years prior to working on this volume.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the "gig economy" refers to folks who work as freelances rather than employees -- either for a single company, such as driving exclusively for Uber, or by doing small tasks for multiple companies through a platform such as TaskRabbit or Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

The book is an interesting read, and includes many vignettes of people trying to make their way through the gig economy. Although I'm not a fan of relying solely on anecdotes to make a point, they can be quite effective when interspersed with more objectively collected empirical research on the same subject.

The author's general thesis (and apparent experience of gig workers) is that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs oversold the positive aspects of the gig economy (freedom, flexibility, challenge, etc.) while downplaying the negative. For a small number of folks with highly marketable skills, such as computer programmers, the gig economy may actually live up to some of the hype. For displaced blue collar workers, however, the gig economy can mean working for below minimum wage.

Kessler makes the point that although the app-driven nature the current gig economy relies heavily on technology, companies have always sought to reduce the cost of labor through temp agencies.
I worked for the temp agency Kelly Services (which began as "Kelly Girls" back in the late 1940s) during summer breaks as an undergrad, for example.

Temp agencies were originally intended to help companies deal with temporary fluctuations in work load to reduce the need to hire (and subsequently fire) new staff members. Over time, however, companies began to rely on "temp" workers as cheap alternatives to employees. Although I had a small number of "one off" jobs through Kelly Services, for the most part I worked at a call center for the credit card application division of a bank (and to this day dislike both credit card solicitations and talking on the phone).
 
For a company like Uber, however, the vast majority of the workforce are considered "independent contractors" and not "employees." This distinction has important legal ramifications, as employees can expect certain protections and benefits that do not extend to contractors.

Kessler's book suggests that we need to rethink how we view work and benefits that have traditionally been associated with "regular" employment (health care, etc.). For better or worse, the gig economy is not going away any time soon.