The Gig Economy: WTF? Precarity and Work under Neoliberalism | Tom Nicholas

if you've ever taken an uber or lyft had food delivered through just eat or to liver ooh or hired someone to perform a service through TaskRabbit or Fiverr and you've participated in what's known as the gig economy some of you will likely have experienced this from the other side driving delivering or working through such a service and unlike the vast majority of developments in the employment market the right of the gig economy has received a fair amount of press attention with the phrase establishing itself fairly firmly as a point of reference in the popular consciousness some view the gig economy as a hugely exciting development providing services to consumers at a far lower cost than ever before whilst offering workers a greater degree of flexibility in how and when they work to others however it is little more than a Trojan horse which allows multinational corporations to circumvent hard-won employment rights and further exploit workers in today's episode of what the theory my ongoing series in which I provide accessible introductions to key theories in cultural studies and the wider humanities we're going to take a brief look at how the gig economy works and what makes it stand out from the rest of the economy perhaps more interesting you however we're also going to take a look at some historical precedents to this supposedly new form of employment and consider the ramifications that the Giga fication of the wider economy might have for how all of us live and work before we get going if you have any thoughts questions or suggestions as we go along then please don't hesitate to drop those down below in the comments and if you're new around here and this seems like your kind of thing then please do consider subscribing and hitting the notifications bells you get little buzz every time I put out a new video furthermore a quick shout out to Cindy Nelson for recently signing up to the top tier of my patreon page if you'd like to joint injury in supporting what I do here and get your hands on copies of the scripts to these videos as well as some other perks then I'd be super grateful if you check that out at patreon.com forward slash Tom with that out of the way however let's crack on with the gig economy what the theory [Applause] [Music] if I was to ask you to show me an example of the gig economy you would very likely reach into your pockets take out your phone and show me one of a number of apps certainly it'll be hard to understate the role of technology in the gig economies rise to prominence on a very basic level a considerable factor in prompting many to use just eat over ringing up a local takeaway or to book an uber over calling a conventional taxi company is the sheer beauty and functionality of the apps around which these services were evolved on the unseen back-end to new technologies often enable gig economy services to be much quicker than those which they seek to replace no longer does the person Manning the phones at a taxi company say first have to speak to the customer and then call up a driver to pass on the details of where they want to be picked up from and where they'd like to go to instead Luber or lyft are able to instantaneously send a notification to multiple drivers in that customer's vicinity finally such automation often makes these services some degree cheaper than the alternative nevertheless something I'm keen to stress in today's video is that the gig economies use of technology is in truth far less significant than it might 1st c4 as Jeremiah's prattle writes in his 2018 book humans as a service in thinking about the gig economy it's crucial that we look beyond platforms powerful technology we will discover fascinating digital innovations and genuine entrepreneurship opportunities but we must not let that mislead us into a world of technological exceptionalism the geek economy's product first and foremost is work new technologies then might have enabled companies such as uber lyft deliver ooh just eat and many others to achieve a significant level of market share in record time yet there is something more fundamental which differentiates them from the services that they are wrestling to displace and that is the manner in which these services are working to redefine the relationship between workers and the companies they work for let's take the example of delivering a food delivery service based in the UK which operates in a number of countries throughout the world if you decide to order food through delivery and you do so by ordering through the delivery app or their website and a short while later someone will turn up by your door who will very likely be wearing delivery branded clothing and carrying your food in a delivery branded insulated bag and what would be forgiven for assuming that person to be an employee of deliver room generally when we see someone wearing a company's uniform and performing tasks for that company we assume them to be being paid an hourly or weekly wage or salary by that company in truth however those who deliver food for deliver room the company refers to them as riders are not employed by the company but are in fact each self-employed and what this means in short is that in the eyes of the law each Rider rather than being part of the corporate entity that is delivery is instead running their own one-person micro business to which delivery subcontract each customers food order rather than being paid a set hourly wage for their work then riders are thus paid a fee per delivery reportedly around 450 per order as of 2018 and rather than the use of technology it is this reconstitution of the relationship between workers and companies away from a relatively stable relationship between employers and employees with a degree of ongoing contractual responsibility to one another and towards a dynamic in which workers are merely contracted per individual task which is the most significant development that the gig economy is presently fostering see this shift in the relationship between workers and companies has a number of consequences the most immediate is that during any given shift what a gig economy worker earns is no longer related to how long they work for but instead how productive they are in the example of delivery if a rider is particularly fast and there are a lot of orders coming in one evening then this of course means that they have the potential to make far more money per hour than they might have done if they were tied to an hourly wage if there are less orders being made one evening however the opposite is true though a rider might be waiting by their bike ready to deliver deliver who is not required to pay them a single penny where in a traditional employer employee relationship then it is taken as a given that it is the company that should shoulder the greater amount of risk with regard to how well a product sells or how popular our services in the gig economy we find that risk to be shared between the company and those who working for it the sharing of risk extends from the relatively simple matter of how much a gig economy work and might earn one evening out into matters of illness and injury for one in most nations in the global north workers employed by a company tend to be entitled to some kind of sick pay if they are ill or compensation if they are injured in the course of their work gig economy workers are in many cases entitle to absolutely nothing from the company that they work for nevertheless proponents of the gig economy will argue that all of this is kind of balanced out by the fact that workers also have no ongoing obligations to the company or companies that they work for if a delivery rider felt that working for just eat or even trying for uber might be more lucrative one evening than riding for delivery then there's nothing to stop them from doing so and if this were to happen enough then the theory is that delivery would have to increase the amount that they pay their riders per livery or perhaps provide better benefits in order to attract riders back in reality however all this flexibility tends to work far more in favour of gig economy companies than those working for them in his 2018 book riding for delivery resistance in the new economy for instance former delivery rider and current political science PhD Kalam writes that in the early days of delivery the company would fairly often temporarily raise the rates that riders were paid per delivery during periods when there are either a lot of orders coming through or when the weather was particularly bad as an incentive to encourage riders to make themselves available he suggests that this spin itself was telling and that this meant that we knew that a higher peace rate was possible if they could afford to pay us five pound a drop during peak times there was no clear reason to reduce it to four pounds during less busy times when we would be doing less deliveries per hour this aside however he continues that these incentives were only really a stopgap solution and that soon delivery found a solution to this problem which negated the need for raising rates of pay at all they simply recruited more riders with more riders competing for deliveries workers became far more inclined to work during unfavourable evening and nighttime hours as well as in bad weather it wasn't that the pay would be any higher but simply because doing so meant less time waiting by the bike and earning nothing this fostering of competition between workers is a core feature of the gig economy and is a key factor in ensuring that though the gig economy is often celebrated for providing both companies and workers with a greater degree of flexibility it is the companies themselves who benefit the most for while it is certainly possible to encourage employees to work longer or harder in pursuit of a Christmas bonus or promotion it is far far easier to motivate workers through the constant reminder that they are replaceable and thus at risk of losing their livelihood at a moment's notice the use of apps to arrange the logistics of gig economy services also enables companies to track the performance of their workers Kant writes that when he was working for delivery there were certain performance standards we were meant to reach during our share apparently we were meant to accept 90% of orders and to live them within certain times failing to meet these standards could lead to your supplier agreement contract being terminated immediately having a ready supply of workers ready to take the place of anyone who drops below the high standard expected thus enables gig economy companies to be constantly pressuring their workers to work harder and faster and in this we find the gig economy to be but one manifestation of a broader movement in global economy and politics over the past few decades towards a specific form of capitalism known as neoliberalism if you would like a more complete overview of neoliberalism then I would suggest checking out my video dedicated to that very topic in short however neoliberalism is a form of capitalism which valorizes the so-called free market neoliberals though few choose to actively identify with that term argue that markets are inherently logical and that freer more competitive markets will always produce the highest quality product and services at the most logical price neoliberalism thus sees any kind of regulation or moderation of markets by governments or anyone else as something to be avoided the embrace of neoliberal capitalism by governments across the world has thus seen efforts to privatize public services and rollback all kinds of government regulation of private enterprise and this neoliberal disdain for regulation also extends to employment markets we've already seen the manner in which by reconstituting workers as contractors rather than employees gig economy companies able to circumvent hard-won workers rights and employee protections both things that neoliberalism views as improper incursions into the inherent logic ality of the market but the idea of having more workers in pursuit of employment than available jobs is also a highly favored scenario for neo liberals see between the end of the Second World War and the early nineteen eighty's governments in many of the advanced capitalist nations sought to maintain as high unemployment rates as possible it was generally considered that making sure that everyone who wanted a job was able to get one was a positive both for the economy and for society in general yet new liberal economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman argued that full employment of this kind would inevitably lead to high rates of inflation with the threat of unemployment levy ated they argued that workers would be able to demand higher and higher wages and thus that's if they still wanted to be able to make a profit companies would continually increase the prices of goods and services freedom and in particular the argued that a situation in which there is zero unemployment is bad for an economy and that instead there is something called a natural rate of unemployment the political argument that extends from such a notion is that it is in fact positive for some people to be unemployed to any given time and that's with many arguments helped by mainstream economists and neoliberal economists in particular who that is good for is generally shareholders and c-e-o in the gig economy we see this vision of an employment market in which there is always what Friedrich Engels referred to as a reserve army of labour ready to take up work turned down by others in action the gig economy is constituted in a manner which places workers in constant competition with one another whether in terms of their efficiency or their willingness to work for Less pay and in less desirable conditions for all the arguments that the Gig economy's flexibility might be a positive for those working within it then we again find it benefiting companies far more than workers in my video on neoliberalism itself I regularly frames the emergence of this particular form of capitalism as less of a new development and instead a return to the unregulated viscerally exploitative capital of the 18th 19th and very early 20th centuries throughout the nascent literature on the gauge economy we find academics making a similar case with regard to the gig economy and employment as Alexandria Jay Raven L writes in her 2019 book hustle and gig for all its app enabled modernity the gig economy resembles the early Industrial Age where workers worked long hours in a piecemeal system workplace safety was non-existent and there were few options for address despite its focus on emerging technology apps smartphones contactless payment systems and review systems the sharing economy is truly a movement forwards to the past workers find themselves outside even the most basic workplace protections regarding discrimination and sexual harassment the right to unionize and even the right to redress for workplace injuries the sharing economy is appending generations of workplace protections in the name of disruption and returning to a time when worker exploitation was the norm of course as Raven L hints the conditions of the early industrial period led to the birth of the trade union movement workers recognized that they were being exploited and banded together to fight for better pay and treatment in the present day we see a number of attempts to do just that among big economy workers in the UK the independent workers of Great Britain for instance have been supporting uber drivers and delivery riders to organize and campaign for better pay and conditions nevertheless doing so is highly challenging one challenge lies in the very fact that gig economy workers are self-employed and thus in many countries are simply not entitled to engage in collective bargaining for higher wages or better conditions through trade unions or any other mechanism whether they work for many companies or as is more often the case are dependent on own the fact that they are contractors rather than employees forced them from a great deal of legal protection a further struggle comes in the manner in which gig economy employees simply spend less time together the recent documentary American Factory released by Netflix in 2019 depicts how hard starting a union can be even in a scenario in which workers share a workspace break room and carpark things become even more challenging however in the gig economy where workers might only ever meet each other fleetingly it is often not impossible to know how many people are working for a particular gig economy service in a certain town or city and thus to even know who one is trying to organize and this is before one takes into account the task of challenging the narrative of into work of competition and thus the potential skepticism towards collaboration which gig economy companies seem to be so adept at fostering so to conclude the gig economy is often presented as an essentially technological phenomenon when we dig beneath the surface however we find that it's more significant impact has been on how we work proponents of the gig economy will often suggest that it provides greater flexibility and a higher earning potential to workers wanting to escape the mundanity of the nine-to-five job in truth however this increased flexibility in worker company relations is a far greater benefit to gig economy companies than those working for them it provides companies with the ability to circumvent hard-won workers rights and employment legislation and places workers in direct competition with one another forcing them to accept ever lower pay and worse conditions and though we can find numerous examples of people attempting to organize gig economy workers into trade unions in order to better challenge exploitative practices the odds are firmly stacked against them finally it is worth highlighting that such practices have increasingly begun to spread beyond services that we would consider part of the gig economy self zero hours contracts and other forms of casualized employment in which employees are not guaranteed hours week to week and in which employers are able to cancel shifts and even terminate entire contracts at short notice have become increasingly common over the past decade though working-class jobs have never been equitably paid during the post-war period the presence of trade unions and employment legislation generally meant that one could expect a level of stability in there were in the gig economy and increasingly beyond it however we find workers increasingly forced into precarious work where little can be taken for granted at all thank you very much for watching this video I hope it's provided a decent primer on the gig economy and may be raised a few thoughts in your own head if you know of anyone who might think find it interesting then please do share it with them it's always nice to share these videos with new people and thanks once again to Sandra Nilson as well as to ash to army of me to Jay Fraser Cartwright and to Michael v Brown for and being on the top tier of my patreon page if you would like to join them in supporting what I do here then please do head over to patreon calm for word slash Tom Nicholas but you can find out a little bit more other than that thanks so much for watching once again and have a great week

Channel: Tom Nicholas

Views: 161,374

Keywords: gig economy, the gig economy, neoliberalism, precarity, precarious, employment, sharing economy, economy, work, precarious employment, neoliberal, casual employment, deliveroo, uber, lyft, what the theory, taskrabbit, fiverr, side hustle, friedman, milton friedman, hayek, Friedrich hayek, friedrich von Hayek, Callum cant, workers rights, labour laws, employment laws, neoliberal capitalism, trade unions, platform capitalism, unions, union organising, workers, deliveroo riders, tom nicholas

Id: 0kKaNfzOXRA

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 30 2019