Monolecte 😷🤬

The Gig Is Up
▻https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/the-gig-is-up
▻https://images.ctfassets.net/e529ilab8frl/2AaXPxH1O7FfZEZEn8H8tE/a822a13ba9c2ba58228e748c79a47b2c/IMG_1812.PNG?w=1200&fm=jpg&fl=progressive

The first myth that buttresses the gig economy is in its name: the word “gig.” “Gig” is a word that was first used to describe jazz acts at clubs in the ’20s—a far cry from the type of work that 41 million people in the US engage with today. Today, for most, gig work is not a fun hobby, an optional extracurricular, or a side hustle to earn extra pocket money. In fact, for more than two-thirds of workers on these apps, the job is a full-time haul. Most gig workers I spoke to work overtime, meaning the patchwork of jobs from apps they can cobble together often overtakes the forty hours we typically associate with a workweek.

The eight-hour workday was a hard-won victory by labor organizers of yesterday. Today, gig corporations are actively undermining those victories. In Hustle and Gig, sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle details past labor struggles that afforded many workers protections like the forty-hour workweek. She puts gig workers’ exclusion from these protections plainly: “Gig economy workers are often second class citizens in the labor world, denied many of the same rights taken for granted by workers in the mainstream economy.”

Shawnta, one GigSmart worker I interviewed, is active on four different apps—Instawork, GigSmart, Wonolo, and WorkWhile—through which she does a range of work, from housekeeping to birthday party setup to warehousing. She told me she clocks in about fifty to sixty hours each week. Jay, another GigSmart worker, similarly has done gigs as diverse as college food service and even a dinosaur-suit performance. They don’t particularly enjoy the jobs, and wouldn’t recommend them to friends, but admit, “It’s a good thing if you need fifty bucks today.”

#work #travail