There's No Such Thing as 'The Gig Economy'

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/your-gig-economy-is-some-kind-of-marketing-wizardry

"The current frenzy over “the sharing economy,” “the gig economy,” “the 1099 economy,” “the on-demand economy”—whatever you want to call it—makes it seem as though on-demand delivery services and exploitive freelance labor models are new. These labels are convenient for the kind of technology industry marketing that frames every company as a unique innovation in order to convince investors to invest and consumers to consume, and for journalists who need to write about new trends in order to convince editors and readers that they matter. Even the most passionate detractors of sharing, gigs, and 1099s have a vested interest in acting like this is a horrifying expression of new technological forces, in order to build energy around regulation and labor reform.

But this is not new. Service economy + smartphones = service economy.

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Is Dominos a tech company now that it has an app?

Technology has had a hand in widening the wealth gap and eliminating much of the middle-class since this industry shift began decades ago. But with the other hand, tech scoops up and delivers old promises of middle-class life and delivers them to the new poor. It’s cheaper to eat out, to shop, to entertain yourself, and to obtain consumer technology that makes all those things even more convenient, even on just $21,000 a year. A knowledge economy is sometimes referred to as “an economics of abundance, not scarcity.” It’s really an economics of scarcity with the appearance of abundance.

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If a freelance labor model is the gig economy's true innovation, it’s late on that one as well. Independent contract work has been on the rise ever since America shifted away from a manufacturing economy, simply because it’s cheaper. Taxi drivers were freelancers decades before Uber was a misty twinkle in Travis Kalanick’s greedy eye.

Of course, unique moral outrage is seductive. Someone being paid $5 an hour to deliver toilet paper to people who make $300 an hour and are ideologically opposed to tipping does look very gross, lazy, and inhumane, not to mention indicative of a deeply broken economy and an incredibly warped definition of “innovation.” And tech certainly has a rare ability to further the distance between laborers and their bosses, dehumanizing all of this very human service work."

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