A gig guide for the 21st century

future without the indignities, petty cruelties, exploitation and misery of capitalist work is possible, and it is one worth fighting for’ (p. 166).

Thomas Klikauer has 700 publications and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism. His next book is on Media Capitalism (Palgrave).

Meg Young (GCA and GCPA, University of New England at Armidale) is a Sydney Financial Accountant & HR Manager who likes good literature and proof reading. Contact: T.Klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

References

Blake, W. (1804). Jerusalem – The emanation of the giant Albion (edited with an introduction and notes by Morton D. Paley). London & Princeton: William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press (1991). Burtch, G., Carnahan, S. & Greenwood, B. N. (2018). Can you gig it? An empirical examination of the gig economy and entrepreneurial activity. Management Science, 64(12), 5497-5520. Hudson, K. (2019). Lowborn: growing up, getting away and returning to Britain’s poorest towns. London: Chatto & Windus. Jones, O. (2011). Chavs: the demonisation of the working class. London: Verso. Klikauer, T. & Link, C. (2021). The Good-Doing Elite. Retrieved from https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-good-doing-elite/ Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz. Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, 38(1), 56-97. Wood, A. (2020). Despotism on demand: how power operates in the flexible workplace. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Youn, S. (2019). 40% of Americans don’t have $400 in the bank for emergency expenses: Federal Reserve. ABC News. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400emergency-expense-federal/story?id=63253846

The Gig Economy – Workers and Media in the Age of Convergence, by Brian Dolber, Michelle RodinoColocino, Chenjerai Kumanyika & Todd Wolfson

ISBN 9780367686222, Routledge, London, xvii+322 pp., 2021.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young

Written by 33 international authors and organised by four editors, Brian Dolber and his colleagues’ book The Gig Economy provides more than just a contemporary examination of a rather cool sounding part of capitalism – The Gig Economy. Behind the trendy name lurks a reality of work that is everything but cool. The book’s seventeen chapters show as much.

One of the key lessons of the entire volume appears right in the book’s first line when Michelle Rodino-Colocino says, ‘if we don’t band together, it’s only going to get crappier’ (p. 3). That work is going to be crappier defines not only the neoliberal workplace but the gig economy as a whole. Crappy work remains part of the gig economy that, according to the US Department of Labor, is defined as, ‘a single project or tasks for which a worker is hired, often through a digital marketplace, to work on demand’ (p. 4). The resulting and often highly standardised working conditions can create circumstances that can unify workers throughout the gig economy to improve them. In other words, gig workers are ‘recognising their common interests’ (p. 4) for higher wages, shorter working hours, and better working conditions.

Yet, unlike many other workers, gig workers also struggle for recognition in a very particular way. They ‘demand immediate recognition of drivers’ rights as employees’ (p. 5). Gig workers are employed under the manageriallegal hallucination of being contractors – not employees – by ‘the captains of data-mediated capitalism’ (p. 5). In that, gig management is aided by the fact that sections of gig management have become algorithmic management. Algorithmic management relies on mathematical algorithms used as a technical form of control.

As such, management ‘cultivates a comforting sense of technical neutrality’ (p. 7). This is incredibly useful to management. It can setup control systems, engineer surveillance, and discipline workers while pretending that these are only technical and neutral issues. In reality,

such algorithms are not much more than managerial ideas formulated as mathematical formulas. These do exactly what management wants them to do. One might indeed call this version of algorithmic control, ‘algorithmic oppression’ (p. 8).

Management fancies this particularly when it comes to the ‘Never Never Girl who never takes a vacation or holiday, never asks for a rise, and never fails to please’ (p. 8) and, of course, never goes on strike. The managerial wish of the Never Never Girl is powerfully assisted through the managerial fiction of workers as contracted gig workers because the US National Labor Relations Board, for example, excludes those workers from accessing ‘key labour rights such as the right to unionise and bargain collectively’ (p. 23) – which is a human right covering all workers with no exclusion.

In addition, corporate managers or those that can be called corporate apparatchiks also like to offload unwarranted elements of production onto workers. Economists use the word ‘externalisation’ for this. It simply means, to let someone else bear the cost of what capitalism does, e.g. environmental vandalism, underpaying workers, etc. In the case of gig workers, offloading costs onto workers is pushed through even though ‘four in five drivers [for example, want] health insurance … about 79% would like to receive overtime pay, while 74% would like paid sick leave and access to a retirement plan’ (p. 40).

Yet, ‘gig companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars … to avoid reclassifying their workforce as employees’ (p. 42). The payoffs for companies and corporations are huge. As long as gig workers can be managed through a platform and kept in the insecure status of being contractors – not employees. This is now a global phenomenon. The situation of gig workers in India, for example, is even worse. In India, digital platforms for domestic workers have ‘grown at a rate of 60% month on month’ (p. 47) pushing Indian domestic workers ever deeper into informal work.

These ‘on-demand platforms provide a short-term service, closest to the Uber-model of the gig economy’ (p. 49). Of course, the Orwellian language of Managerialism has to remain deceptive when seeking to smokescreen reality. The language of Managerialism might well be a form of Gaslighting – a term used in propaganda to indicate when fiction and reality become blurred. A good example is the managerialist word ‘partner’. On this a worker said, ‘they call us partners, but that is just a misnomer. Eventually, they do what they want to do and we have no option but to obey. Is that what a partner is?’ (p. 52).

The basics of the gig economy also apply to another group of workers who, in addition to precarious working conditions also experiences ‘stigmatisation as sex workers’ (p. 59) as Lauren Levitt outlines. And indeed, ‘sex work shares many characteristics of the gig economy’ (p. 61). Like ‘gig work, sex work frequently denies workplace rights such as a minimum wage, maximum weekly hours, or protection against discrimination’ (p. 62). Interestingly, ‘many [sex] workers have day jobs, or on-going employment outside the sex industry … Liz works as a receptionist in a funeral home part time and at the same time, as being a dominatrix’ (p. 68). Yet, the gig economy not only includes dominatrix but also offers books on how to become a gig worker.

As one might have expected that there is an industry that pretends to help workers into the gig economy. It publishes guidebooks on how to become a gig worker. The key message of these guidebooks is that they ‘conceive success and failure as individuals rather than structural’ (p. 76). In other words, horrific working conditions, insecurity, and low wages are a worker’s personal fault. They have nothing to do with management and capitalism. Instead, gig workers are told to ‘embrace a gig mind-set [which] involves learning to monetise a passion’ (p. 80). The perversion continues with ‘life as a portfolio [and the] life-ing of work’ (p. 82). Much of this is designed for the ‘idealisation of gig work [to eventually] substitute life for work’ (p. 85) with the goal of ‘self-help becoming self-blame’ (p. 86).

Yet, the supposedly neutral term gig economy also impacts negatively on people outside the gig economy, as Brian Dolber and Christina Geisel’s examination of Airbnb shows. The ‘company reinforces racial segregation and gentrification of US housing markets [with] most [of] Airbnb’s revenue [going] disproportionally to new white residents and speculators’ (p. 111). In other words, ‘Airbnb … perpetuates structural racism’ (p. 112). Beyond that, ‘Airbnb has developed a program, Airbnb Citizen, which mobilises petitbourgeois hosts towards political action in order to protect corporate interests’ (p. 112). On the whole, ‘Airbnb reflects neoliberal and neo-fascist tendencies in mobilising consumers in its interest’ (p. 112).

As one might have expected, academic labour is not excluded from all this, as the process of ‘Uberisation moves academic labour into the sphere of the gig economy’ (p. 125). Here too, the neoliberal university and the gig economy is ‘shifting its focus from rights to risks’ (p. 126). Increasingly, management shifts these risks onto academic staff which ‘are now expected to be social entrepreneurs and enjoy it’ (p. 126). Perhaps even more than in the case of Uber, academics move from ‘project to project … a determining character of the gig economy’ (p. 127). Meanwhile, ‘over 70 per cent [of US academics] are in non-tenure-track positions’ (p. 128) – signifying ‘gig academia’ (p. 131).

For gig academia too, the neoliberal ideology of ‘being your own boss draws more … workers into precarious careers’– often with no careers at all, but high degrees of ‘financial insecurity’ (p. 160). Beyond the shiny promises of being your own boss, lurks the reality of the gig economy namely, that algorithms and other ‘socio-technical feature of platforms

reinforce … social inequality’ (p. 162). This works not only in academic labour, it also works in many other sectors as well.

For ‘platform-mediated sex work [for example, this means that] platforms aim to squeeze the most value out of commodel labour … collecting 40% to 70% [of all] earnings’ (p. 168), as Kavita Ilona Nayar notes. Worse, ‘marginalisation of sex work gives platforms more control over their labour and the ability to institute unfair terms and conditions with little pushback’ (p. 168). The setup also feeds ‘the myth that a model can create their own stability’ (p. 170). Worse, algorithms linked to cameras also work their magic as ‘MyFreeCams use “camscores” to rank models’ (p. 170).

Of course, there are plenty of online platforms ‘seeking to incorporate cultural practices into profitable business practices’ (p. 180). Yet, the ‘class struggle has not vanished; it has been remade and masked’ (p. 180). In academia, as in sex work, as in many other areas of the gig economy, what Randy Nichols calls ‘hope labour’ (p. 181) is propagated. Hope labour exists when ‘people provide free labour hoping it leads to employment’ (p. 181) – often an unfulfilled hope.

Virtually all of this depends on a massive amount of data. This data – big data – feeds digital capitalism. Indeed, ‘data is to digital capitalism what oil or minerals have been to earlier industrial stages of capitalism, for it must be mined, extracted, and refined by algorithms’ (p. 190). ‘Algorithms have enabled us to “datafy” the world’ (p. 190). Perhaps Uber is the prime example.

‘Uber … rents hardware and software from AWS’s Cloud platform and relies on Google for mapping, Braintree for payments,

SendGrid for emailing, and Twilio for texting … Uber offloads the costs of transportation to its drivers … Uber engages in what we call data fracking … Uber’s app penetrates deep beneath the surface of everyday life to collect, direct, and leverage valuable flows of data for competitive advantage, often creating public hazards for consumers, drivers, and municipal planners from its data hoarding in the process … with each ride or delivery transaction, Uber amasses a wealth of data’ (p. 192). And ‘Uber often uses data it collects against drivers … Uber leverages data on its drivers to control them [and finally,] Uber’s ratings system makes management omnipresent’ (p. 193).

In other words, Uber – like many other platforms – has established the near perfect system of surveillance capitalism. George Orwell could have hardly come up with the more evil ‘Big Brother is watching you’ system. The sheer wickedness and perfection of these systems do indeed constitute ‘yet another blow to unions’ (p. 207). In order to fight these blows against trade unions, perhaps what is termed ‘platform organising’ (p. 207) is needed. Platform organising takes on three forms (p. 207): 1. Labour and solidarity organising: this is the online organising of a highly-skilled core workforce of a tech sector company. 2. Resistance organising: this is the organising of workers’ resistance to the gig economy, as well as resistance to companies governing the labour forces through digital platforms; and finally, 3. Counter-platform organising: this is the development of specific counter-platforms for workers dedicated to facilitating communication among workers for the purposes of political action, mutual support, strikes, boycotts, and labour organising in general.

Of course, once communication is channelled through online platforms by management, ‘asymmetrical communication regimes’ (p. 209) are established. In that way, ‘management dominates labour communication both externally and internally’ (p. 209) making it even harder for labour and trade unions to organise. Not only because of this deficiency or structural advantage of corporations, labour’s communication is forced to rely on two forms: communication ‘organised through mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, slack.com, etc.; the second form are dedicated labour-organising platforms that are purpose-built for worker-to-worker communication’ (p. 213).

Yet, trade unions and workers need to make sure ‘that platforms [do not] become seen as the ends rather than the means for developing worker power’ (p. 218). Beyond that, a central theme of the entire book is what Callum Cant and Jamie Woodcock describe in the following way, ‘while a central premise of platform capitalism is that workers are no longer workers but rather independent contractors, the struggles documented here show that whether they are categorised that way or not, workers are finding new ways to collectively struggle’ (p. 266).

Finally, Michelle Rodino-Colocino and Chenjerai Kumanyika end the book by repeating the very first line of the book, ‘if we don’t band together, it’s only going to get crappier’ (p. 277). This testifies to the key message of a brilliant book that brings together a truly global range of insights into the gig economy.

Thomas Klikauer has 700 publications and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism. His next book is on Media Capitalism (Palgrave).

Meg Young (GCA and GCPA, University of New England at Armidale) is a Sydney Financial Accountant & HR Manager who likes good literature and proofreading. Contact: T.Klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au