Terrific article, Dan! Right now we have the worst of both worlds--gig workers make low pay plus they have no benefits. The only way to make it sustainable for workers and investors alike is to have benefits like healthcare and paid time off be part of a public social safety net, as they are in every other developed country. Otherwise, the workers are just subsidizing the consumers. And I totally agree about taxes. When I was in grad school and adjuncting, I had to pay estimated taxes every year on money I had not yet earned and had no way of knowing whether I would even receive. I would send off my little checks to the IRS, hoping all the while that I had gotten the amounts right and wouldn’t get audited, and completely skeptical that if I had overpaid I would ever see the money owed me. It is insane that the lowest-paid workers have to cope with this, especially since the Uber app could just keep track of earnings and generate a W2, and workers could pay their taxes for the previous year, like all other workers.
On the one hand, I have been part of the gig economy, as a freelance writer, since 2008. OTOH I barely participate in this economy: I've used Uber a handful of times and never have food/groceries delivered.* I live in NYC and hate how the delivery people - whom, I acknowledge, are generally poorly paid and have crappy jobs - tear through my neighborhood on their motorized bikes, ignoring traffic laws and endangering people on sidewalks. I hate how the ride-hail drivers look at their phones when they should be watching the street and idle in crosswalks and bike lanes. I've never hired someone to help me hang pictures or put together Ikea furniture, things (like grocery shopping) I'm perfectly capable of doing myself and don't want to pay a premium to have others do. I get why some people use them, and don't have a problem with them existing per se, but just as the economy needs to catch up with reality, the built environment of cities - where the market for these services is concentrated - also has a lot of work to do.
*Obviously, as I never have food delivered, I am not a real New Yorker, I'm a transplant from the rustbelt by way of DC.
It's wild to me that these days 36% of US workers are gig workers? (Stat: https://netpayadvance.com/blog/loans-for-gig-workers/) Many of them have full-time jobs! I know I've found myself in that situation. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this on the changing economy and how it's looking for gigs.
Thanks for this really interesting post! Question? Is the “dead hand of history” an original coinage? Love the nod to Smith, and also the haunting quality of the image.
Thank you! It's not really an original coinage. The phrase is "the dead hand of the past" (which, honestly, I don't know where I picked that up from) but I prefer the alliterative version I used.
*exerting major will power to not make a peg in hole joke*
As always, you've thought of this in a way I hadn't considered. Another downside to gig work (esp. delivery services): there's only a relatively small proportion of people who can afford to use them. Between delivery fees and tips, the clientele has to be willing and able to pay up to a 20% premium to use them. I love me some Instacart, but other factors have to overcome the additional cost of the service, so I don't use it as much as I'd like to.
I like this comment as it reminds me of an interesting point I wanted to include but I lost my citation for it. Only about a third of American adults have even used a gig economy service. I feel like that's a lot to do with geography (which I want to explore more in the future) and cost. Personally, I'm unwilling to pay that surcharge to have people bring me my groceries.
There are cases like Uber where it’s not simply convenience (a 1:1 substitution of someone else’s time for mine) but structurally beneficial, for instance not having to park, or not having to own a car. The latter turned out to be pretty marginal from what I understand - it’s really the wear and tear on a car that costs, so above a fixed low amount of driving it isn’t much cheaper. Where economies of scale and grouping of deliveries can apply there are other advantages - but then, we already have USPS, UPS, etc. And they often don’t work without specialized equipment; groceries need either refrigeration or no more than one customer per delivery in a regular car, for cold chain safety.
Then there are specialized skills - but that becomes less casual. There are things you physically can’t do for yourself (massage, haircut) but those often need specialized equipment better located in a storefront business. Taskrabbit tries to do that for a less narrow set of skills but then you’re reliant much more on the particular skills of the person hired.
I don’t think that means there’s no scope to expand if, but that we need to figure out places that don’t have that requirement for a steep inequality gradient. Those are okay for soaking up underemployed marginal workers, better than nothing, but they aren’t The Future of Work.
I hope the last didn’t seem patronizing! I think the best thing about gig jobs is that they have low barriers to entry, or at least different ones to conventional jobs, and acts as a trust broker between strangers, and so they can bring a different set of people into the habit of paid work. It also removes potential-workforce slack that makes bargaining harder for workers at the bottom of the labor market.
That’s the good. The bad is when the gig intermediary can use their control over the conditions of work abusively. That’s what’s worrisome about the Uber model of burning as much money as necessary to demolish any competition, though I think that’s doomed to failure. But it could work in another arena.
One of the reasons we use things like food delivery fairly rarely is because when we first moved to our current city – which is about 50,000 people, it’s not small! – It basically wasn’t available. We used rideshare and food-delivery services quite a bit when we lived in Chicago, but fell off when one time in every three, you would get a message back from the service that just said nobody was available to bring you your stuff. The habit stuck and we just don’t think of doing it now.
I think it’s more available now. When we both had Covid, we made use of food delivery, and I used Instacart for the first time and it was a godsend. But you still can’t get an Uber around here half the time, even if you schedule it in advance. 
Ha! Groceries is one I'm often happy to pay for: because I have little kids and shopping with them adds more of a premium than the delivery service. One tub of cheezballs and one package of oreos ends up being as much as the delivery fees.
Oh, one more thing: Since moving to Switzerland and for the first time in my life, I pay my cleaning lady not as an independent contractor/gig worker, but as an employee of an agency. This is because the Swiss are every bit the sticklers for rules their reputation suggests, and we are trying for our permanent residency in a year and don’t want to mess things up by falling afoul of the law. But yikes! The taxes, insurance, pension, and other benefits the employees receive equal their hourly wage. I do understand that companies want to shed those costs, but it’s not fair that they all be borne by the workers, who are much poorer than shareholders and owners of companies.
Terrific article, Dan! Right now we have the worst of both worlds--gig workers make low pay plus they have no benefits. The only way to make it sustainable for workers and investors alike is to have benefits like healthcare and paid time off be part of a public social safety net, as they are in every other developed country. Otherwise, the workers are just subsidizing the consumers. And I totally agree about taxes. When I was in grad school and adjuncting, I had to pay estimated taxes every year on money I had not yet earned and had no way of knowing whether I would even receive. I would send off my little checks to the IRS, hoping all the while that I had gotten the amounts right and wouldn’t get audited, and completely skeptical that if I had overpaid I would ever see the money owed me. It is insane that the lowest-paid workers have to cope with this, especially since the Uber app could just keep track of earnings and generate a W2, and workers could pay their taxes for the previous year, like all other workers.
Good, thought-provoking post.
On the one hand, I have been part of the gig economy, as a freelance writer, since 2008. OTOH I barely participate in this economy: I've used Uber a handful of times and never have food/groceries delivered.* I live in NYC and hate how the delivery people - whom, I acknowledge, are generally poorly paid and have crappy jobs - tear through my neighborhood on their motorized bikes, ignoring traffic laws and endangering people on sidewalks. I hate how the ride-hail drivers look at their phones when they should be watching the street and idle in crosswalks and bike lanes. I've never hired someone to help me hang pictures or put together Ikea furniture, things (like grocery shopping) I'm perfectly capable of doing myself and don't want to pay a premium to have others do. I get why some people use them, and don't have a problem with them existing per se, but just as the economy needs to catch up with reality, the built environment of cities - where the market for these services is concentrated - also has a lot of work to do.
*Obviously, as I never have food delivered, I am not a real New Yorker, I'm a transplant from the rustbelt by way of DC.
It's wild to me that these days 36% of US workers are gig workers? (Stat: https://netpayadvance.com/blog/loans-for-gig-workers/) Many of them have full-time jobs! I know I've found myself in that situation. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this on the changing economy and how it's looking for gigs.
Thanks for this really interesting post! Question? Is the “dead hand of history” an original coinage? Love the nod to Smith, and also the haunting quality of the image.
Thank you! It's not really an original coinage. The phrase is "the dead hand of the past" (which, honestly, I don't know where I picked that up from) but I prefer the alliterative version I used.
*exerting major will power to not make a peg in hole joke*
As always, you've thought of this in a way I hadn't considered. Another downside to gig work (esp. delivery services): there's only a relatively small proportion of people who can afford to use them. Between delivery fees and tips, the clientele has to be willing and able to pay up to a 20% premium to use them. I love me some Instacart, but other factors have to overcome the additional cost of the service, so I don't use it as much as I'd like to.
I like this comment as it reminds me of an interesting point I wanted to include but I lost my citation for it. Only about a third of American adults have even used a gig economy service. I feel like that's a lot to do with geography (which I want to explore more in the future) and cost. Personally, I'm unwilling to pay that surcharge to have people bring me my groceries.
There are cases like Uber where it’s not simply convenience (a 1:1 substitution of someone else’s time for mine) but structurally beneficial, for instance not having to park, or not having to own a car. The latter turned out to be pretty marginal from what I understand - it’s really the wear and tear on a car that costs, so above a fixed low amount of driving it isn’t much cheaper. Where economies of scale and grouping of deliveries can apply there are other advantages - but then, we already have USPS, UPS, etc. And they often don’t work without specialized equipment; groceries need either refrigeration or no more than one customer per delivery in a regular car, for cold chain safety.
Then there are specialized skills - but that becomes less casual. There are things you physically can’t do for yourself (massage, haircut) but those often need specialized equipment better located in a storefront business. Taskrabbit tries to do that for a less narrow set of skills but then you’re reliant much more on the particular skills of the person hired.
I don’t think that means there’s no scope to expand if, but that we need to figure out places that don’t have that requirement for a steep inequality gradient. Those are okay for soaking up underemployed marginal workers, better than nothing, but they aren’t The Future of Work.
I strongly agree with that last sentence.
I will also admit I mainly use Doordash when I have a good parking space and don't want to lose it.
I hope the last didn’t seem patronizing! I think the best thing about gig jobs is that they have low barriers to entry, or at least different ones to conventional jobs, and acts as a trust broker between strangers, and so they can bring a different set of people into the habit of paid work. It also removes potential-workforce slack that makes bargaining harder for workers at the bottom of the labor market.
That’s the good. The bad is when the gig intermediary can use their control over the conditions of work abusively. That’s what’s worrisome about the Uber model of burning as much money as necessary to demolish any competition, though I think that’s doomed to failure. But it could work in another arena.
One of the reasons we use things like food delivery fairly rarely is because when we first moved to our current city – which is about 50,000 people, it’s not small! – It basically wasn’t available. We used rideshare and food-delivery services quite a bit when we lived in Chicago, but fell off when one time in every three, you would get a message back from the service that just said nobody was available to bring you your stuff. The habit stuck and we just don’t think of doing it now.
I think it’s more available now. When we both had Covid, we made use of food delivery, and I used Instacart for the first time and it was a godsend. But you still can’t get an Uber around here half the time, even if you schedule it in advance. 
Ha! Groceries is one I'm often happy to pay for: because I have little kids and shopping with them adds more of a premium than the delivery service. One tub of cheezballs and one package of oreos ends up being as much as the delivery fees.
Oh, one more thing: Since moving to Switzerland and for the first time in my life, I pay my cleaning lady not as an independent contractor/gig worker, but as an employee of an agency. This is because the Swiss are every bit the sticklers for rules their reputation suggests, and we are trying for our permanent residency in a year and don’t want to mess things up by falling afoul of the law. But yikes! The taxes, insurance, pension, and other benefits the employees receive equal their hourly wage. I do understand that companies want to shed those costs, but it’s not fair that they all be borne by the workers, who are much poorer than shareholders and owners of companies.