HRpedia: 'Gig economy'
The new employee status, led by Uber, Taskrabbit et al
Gig economy, n.
An American import as dubious as Hershey’s chocolate, the ‘gig economy’ is the latest and greatest in business buzzwords.
It has slipped the surly bonds of blogs and slunk into the mainstream — so mainstream in fact that recently even Hillary Clinton has trotted it out, albeit tentatively, referring to it as the “so called” gig economy.
While we usually associate gigs with musicians dragging themselves onto a stage in a sea of drugs for our amusement, this time it’s more crowd-sourcing than crowd surfing.
Gig has actually always been an informal term for a short-term job (also a kind of boat, a horse-drawn carriage, and a kind of spear for catching frogs), and it’s this sense to which the gig economy refers.
It has a shine of rock ‘n’ roll to it, and it sounds a whole lot more appealing than employment. So it’s gigs instead of jobs we’re promised in an economy populated by Ubers and TaskRabbits.
The pace of change is relentless. With the line between work-time and leisure-time becoming increasingly blurred, Mon-Fri, 9-5 working will soon look straitjacketed and dated. Or so we’re told.
We already find the prospect of half of all workers working from 2020 home strange and confusing, but the gig economy looks set to be even weirder.
Exactly how large and how disruptive the gig economy will be is yet to be known. Some say that the percentage of contract workers has been static over the last decade, and the whole thing is overblown.
Others claim this misses the point and relies on outmoded methods of collecting employment data. They show that between 2004 and 2014 in the US, 4% of the total workforce has transitioned from 9-5 jobs into working as independent contractors.
A small percentage, but those are big numbers. Uber alone reports 160,000 active drivers in their fold.
Knitted hats
Whoever is right, new kinds of freelancing and as-and-when working are cropping up all over, and continue to do so. Taxi drivers, cleaners, home DIY, people who knit little hats for a living. Online platforms allow people to sell whatever they can do, so long as somebody wants to pay for it.
So if you always secretly desired to trim hedges at midnight, now you can, if only you can find somebody who needs midnight hedge trimming.
A capitalist dream then — people being paid the value of their services, directly. But capitalist dreams have an awkward tendency towards turning into capitalist nightmares if left unchecked.
Many economists fear that this new wave of mostly unregulated working could end with a nasty wake-up call for a lot of people. Not least that direct competition between workers will probably serve to drive down average wages.
Human beings, not known for their long term planning and prudence, are at risk. Without legal protections, a regular income, and useful things such as pension schemes, naysayers reckon there’s a real risk of people being caught short.
Companies are large enough to absorb the costs of bad times, usually without job cuts. But a slowdown in your particular freelancing niche may mean not earning enough to live on.
Any number of circumstances, like injury or illness may leave people out of pocket too.
The social security of countries worldwide often is intertwined with standard working practices, meaning governments worldwide are still not ready to cope with a rapid shift towards independent workers and micro-entrepreneurs.
Time will tell whether the gig economy turns into a sell-out or a wash-out.
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