Gig Workers Quotes

In Wired magazine, Antonio García Martínez describes the contemporary Silicon Valley as “feudalism with better marketing.” He sees a clear elite of venture capitalists and company founders. Below them are the skilled professionals, well paid but living ordinary middle-class lives, given the high prices and heavy taxes. Below them lies the vast population of gig workers, whom García Martínez compares to sharecroppers in the South. At the bottom, there is an untouchable class of homeless, drug addicts, and criminals.36

I recommend every young entrepreneur do some gig work at least for research purposes. Get out there and work for Lyft or Uber or Instacart or whatever. These platforms allow a person to experience a direct conversion of value created to income earned, whereas most jobs and most entrepreneurial ventures have a lag. And the more intimately you understand value, the better.

It has been estimated by industry insiders in the US that relying on independent contractors rather than employees can lower direct business costs for companies by as much as 25 per cent. At least some of those costs are being offloaded onto the state, and by extension onto taxpayers and other workers. Due to the paucity of many people's earnings in the 'gig' economy, signing on for social security when you fall ill is sometimes the only option. Thus the taxpayer is essentially out of pocket twice over – first as employer national insurance contributions fall, and secondly as this casual workforce turn to the state to survive.

The more I learned, the more I understood that the startup "future of work" story, as consoling as it was, was also incomplete. Yes, the gig economy could create opportunity for some people, but it could also amplify the made the world of work terrifying in the first place; insecurity, increased risk, lack of stability, and diminishing workers' rights.

Around 45% of accountants, 50% of IT workers, and 70% of truck drivers were working for contractors rather than as employees at the companies for which they provided services.

From 25 to 30 percent of employees get income from short-term contracts or freelance work each month and the number is growing.5 The gig economy shows every sign of expanding as employees value the flexibility and employers use gig workers to lower costs. And when it comes to future talent, Generation Z is now becoming known as the entrepreneurial generation.

I had been trying to land a paying stand-up gig in Los Angeles when the Arctic plague arrived in America, infecting the children and the weak. For almost two years I paid the bills as a sanitation worker, cleaning abandoned offices and shuttered schools, while at night I tried to fill dive bars with laughter in exchange for drinks.

Dating back to 2019, Premise had a network of more than 1,000 gig workers in the country (Ukraine) that were being asked to do tasks that they believed were innocuous market research or corporate data collection but were actually secret intelligence-gathering projects for American and other Western allied governments.

The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer.

Jobs that used to come with some guarantees, even union membership, have been transformed into gigs. Temp workers are not just found driving Ubers; they are in hospitals and universities and insurance companies. The manufacturing sector—still widely mistaken as the fount of good, sturdy, hard-hat jobs—now employs more than a million temp workers. Long-term employment has declined steadily in the private sector, particularly for men, and temp jobs are expected to grow faster than all others over the next several years. Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow or shrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970. For scores of American workers, wages are now wobbly, fluctuating wildly not only year to year but month to month, even week to week.

It’s difficult to definitively gauge the size of the gig or contract labor economy, but a 2018 Marist/NPR survey found that some 1 in 5 US workers participate in it.

The rise of gig jobs is not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers. Platforms such as Uber, DoorDash, and TaskRabbit force their employees (sorry, their “independent contractors”) to assume more responsibility on the job—they must supply their own car, buy their own gas, cover their own insurance—while simultaneously subjecting those workers to heightened supervision.

As the number of long-term unemployed, contingent, and gig workers increases, a universal basic income would restore some equity to the system. It would also make the supposed freedom of those TaskRabbit jobs actually mean something, for the laborer would know that even if the company cares little for his welfare or ability to make a living, someone else does and is providing the resources to make sure that economic precarity doesn’t turn into something more dire.

today some of the smartest and most productive talent chooses to give up the rigid strictures of full-time employment in favor of the freedom a project or a gig-based lifestyle affords them

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is creating a self-employment economy based on creativity - gig workers, freelancers, Apps, investments and entrepreneurship. It is now much easier to start your own thing than any other time in history. Don’t focus on the threats; focus on the opportunities! There's more to sell than just labour.

Promoters of the “gig economy”—the term used to describe freelance work enabled by technology platforms like AirBnB, Uber, and TaskRabbit—often argue that it can reduce financial instability. When workers’ income dips in their regular jobs, the argument goes, they can fill the gap with short-term gigs. While that may be true in theory, how it works in practice is much less clear.

An Opportunity-Minded worker actively connects with others, learns new skills, and seeks out new experiences.

Putting together percentages for the two types of automatability _ 38 percent from one-to-one replacements and about 10 percent from ground-up disruption _ we are faced with a monumental challenge. Within ten to twenty years, I estimate we will be technically capable of automating 40 to 50 percent of jobs in the United States. For employees who are not outright replaced, increasing automation of their workload will continue to cut into their value-add for the company, reducing their bargaining power on wages and potentially leading to layoffs in the long term. We'll see a larger pool of unemployed workers competing for an even smaller pool of jobs, driving down wages and forcing many into part-time or "gig economy" work that lacks benefits.

Made up of over 150 million individual freelancers, the human cloud represents a new breed of technology natives who are redefining century old descriptions of both task and technique

in a world more networked and connected than ever, your talent increasingly doesn’t carry an employee ID.

Over a generation, America has grappled with one problem after another that could be said to have contributed to the decay of its politics and many people’s livelihoods. The American social contract has frayed, and workers’ lives have grown more precarious, and mobility has slowed. These are hard and important problems. The new winners of the age might well have participated in the writing of a new social contract for a new age, a new vision of economic security for ordinary people in a globalized and digitized world. But as we’ve seen, they actually made the situation worse by seeking to bust unions and whatever other worker protections still lingered and to remake more and more of the society as an always-on labor market in which workers were downbidding one another for millions of little fleeting gigs. “Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by start-ups,” the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham once tweeted. As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out. Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good. Diverting the public’s attention from an issue like offshore banking worsens the big problems, even as these MarketWorlders shower attention on niche causes. As life expectancy declined among large subpopulations of Americans, winners possessed of a sense of having arrived might have chipped in. They might have taken an interest in the details of a health care system that was allowing the unusual phenomenon of a developed country regressing in this way, or in the persistence of easily preventable deaths in the developing world. They might not have thought of themselves at all, given how long they were likely to live because of their tremendous advantages. “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” Bill Gates has said.

Turns out, talking about the gig economy is a bit of a red herring; it avoids dealing with the vast majority of workers whose work is merely dull and doesn’t pay enough to live, let alone live well.