The Promise and Peril of a Gig Economy

Most people do not thrive on chaos. We are an adaptive animal, but we are also talkative, which gives us the power to talk ourselves into problems that would not otherwise exist. We also have bills to pay. Student loans suck a percentage of cash from many millennials’ paychecks, and should the paychecks stop coming, loan collectors will not stop. Having steady, predictable income reduces some of the stress.

Work also brings with it titles and position power, the stuff of social currency in ours and other industrial cultures. Position power cannot be underestimated. The consultant has as much power as the plumber if the pipes burst or the toilet overflows. Temp workers know how little power they hold. It emboldens some to push hard to solve whatever they think they were asked to do with little regard for the long-term impact. Other temp workers are more reserved, so as to stay below the line of fire, get it done, and hope that, just maybe, somebody on the management side will grant them a stay, ask them to come aboard full-time, and join the club of long-term, healthcare-insured employment. How many people doing gig work would leap at the chance to become a full-time employee with one of their clients?

The gig economy is already changing organizational structures, impacting employment law, and reframing the social construction of our sense of self and our relationships with a work community.

The U.S. is hobbled by its inability to restructure healthcare. There are two basic paths to affordable health insurance in our country: qualify for Medicare or receive insurance through an employer. Gig work isn’t sustainable for many who need health insurance. And yet, companies don’t want to hire when the burden of carrying health insurance coverage adds 30% or more to the cost of carrying a full-time regular employee. We can wax romantic about pre-industrial days when bootstrap-pulling individuals worked for themselves in an agrarian and emerging industrial world, and then philosophize how the new gig world looks like a return to those good old-days, when work ethic was to glorify the Great Other. But sentimentality misses that healthcare wasn’t part of equation in the 19th century, and higher education was mostly an elitist’s endeavor. Throw into this mix that today’s work ethic is better described as working to glorify ourselves.

Call them “temp workers,” “gig workers,” or “improv artists,” the gig is up when psychological security is elusive. Paying rent or mortgage and having health insurance become overwhelmingly stressful. To throw another wrench in the system, one that our government in alignment with financial institutions created, is the reality that student loan debt is out of balance with the investment’s payback. Many people between 22 and 38 are constrained by rules for paying back their student loans. It’s inhibiting their ability to move and to do whatever creative endeavor they pursue. Short-term gigs don’t work for many college graduates who put 15-year liens on their financial future when they were teenagers.

Being in a “gig job” makes it worse. When our government turned over the management and collection of loan payments to large financial institutions, the result has been the creation of an indentured-servant class of workers, made up largely of middle and lower-middle income (former) students. They may be 35 years old, out of college for 13 years, but they get bi-weekly or monthly reminders that they are a powerless debtor, goaded by the hierarchy and faced with a hefty monthly surcharge. Keep in mind that not all who start college finish, but they will still carry the student debt.

We can criticize these young people for mortgaging their own future at 18, but it is not their fault. University tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation for over 25 years, and those increases were precipitated by institutions gaming the system to make more money by competing for corporate money. Federal and state laws were changed to incentivize this competition. Meanwhile, the narrative that a university education will lead to prosperity didn’t change. Indeed, educational institutions and corporations didn’t want it to change and stepped up their marketing efforts to reify the myth because tuition funds provide the working capital needed to make investments to compete for more corporate money. In contrast, tenured faculty (the antithesis of a temp worker) barely noticed, don’t understand how it happened, or don’t care.

The gig economy is in another respect like a collection of specialists, and it works when it’s like a small farming town. Temporary work is common at harvest, but farm towns also have a significant number of independent small businesses serving a tight geographic area. We can point to other examples of how it will work and likely unfold, shaped by communication technologies that shrink the distance between people just as assuredly as it does the travel time to a major library.

The tension between freedom to do work one chooses versus the constraint of our culture to monetize everything will carry us into an Amazonian wilderness with all its bush, bugs, and beasts. How will its next iteration adapt, evolve, or die?