Thursday, January 28, 2016
How Big Is The Gig Economy? The Government Is Finally Going To Find Out
www.fastcompany.com: The gig economy has launched a healthy "future of work" panel circuit amid a roaring debate over whether apps like Uber, Postmates, and Handy—which hire an army of independent contractors instead of employees—represent a return to the sweatshop or a new freedom to work when and how one pleases. But all sides of the debate face the same dilemma: When they propose a new policy or launch a new initiative, they have only a vague idea of how many workers it could impact. There is no current government data that specifically catalogs this group of workers.
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3 comments:
I'm pretty surprised that this didn't already exist-- although, now that I'm thinking about it, I realize that government actions like this take a long time to put into action and the rise of such independent workers is relatively recent. Obviously it's important for the government to realize how many people it's effecting when it creates measures that effect these groups, but I think there's also the viable fear of the government being able to better manipulate and/or stifle them when they need to. After all, the more they know about this new emerging workforce the more they will be able to control them-- either for better or worse. Being completely ignorant about our national economy, I'm intrigued as to what kind of threats this new trend in workers poses. I understand the concern for a return to sweatshop ethics, which is why this new census is being put into place, but I think one also has to take into account our generation's values and mentality.
I didn’t realize that people who work for Uber or Postdate didn’t get counted as employees. I would have thought that since the companies are so big, they would have logged how many people work for them. I guess I never realized that they didn’t send that information along to the government. If you’re independently contracted now, does the company you work for still have to pay employment taxes on you? Will that change when they start counting people as contingent workers?
What’s frustrating about this article is how short it is, so they don’t have the time to explain what this means for the employers or the workers. Since “contingent worker” will appear on surveys about the population, I’m guessing that it won’t change much until they start to get enough data to analyze and compare. Hopefully the new laws they make based on this data will help the worker, bringing us into more freedom to work when we want and how we want, rather than abusing the worker, bringing us bak into the sweatshop days of our past.
It's strange to me this group of the workforce has never been quantified. Does this group of people include solely people who work for Uber, Postmates, or other companies, or all freelance contractors? So much work in the world is based on "gigs," that's where economists predict our standard of work is going. More and more companies are relying on gig jobs to bypass unions and benefit clauses, and many more people are actively entering that workforce as a means of controlling when and how they work, as opposed to being at the mercy of management.
As theater artists, this is how most designers and managers already operate, so this isn't particularly scary to me. But to people who have been raised on the idea of having one job for fifty years, this prospect can be very scary. With this practice comes uncertainty, instability. Many people are afraid of that. But with it comes a more free flowing economic path, where workers come and go as they please. Which is better? I don't know, I'm an 18 year old college student who paints pictures sometimes. Please don't ask me any hard questions.
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