The gig economy is not for everyone – Job Board Doctor

: gig economy sucksThe pan­dem­ic has brought a renewed focus on work­ing remote­ly – which in turn has pushed gig work to the fore­front once again. Makes sense, right? After all, if you’ve been laid off but you still have to pay the bills, any work can good. But some­times I we in the hir­ing indus­try tend to over­sell the gig econ­o­my. It’s not the answer for every­one.

For the pur­pose of this post, I will define gig work as essen­tial­ly ‘work with­out com­mit­ments’. In oth­er words, the employ­er is hir­ing the to do a task – but there is no ongo­ing com­mit­ment to the work­er beyond that par­tic­u­lar task. Thus, you may ‘hire’ a dri­ver to take you from your house to a bar – but you’re not putting them on your pay­roll. Or you may hire an accoun­tant to review your books – but again, there is no employer/employee role. The sec­ond part of gig work as it is cur­rent­ly man­i­fest­ed is some sort of online ‘mar­ket­place’, where the employ­er can locate and hire the work­er. (Note that many folks – myself – don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with the neces­si­ty of an online mar­ket­place. But I’m going with the pop­u­lar def­i­n­i­tion, so I’ll sim­ply agree to dis­agree!).

Thus, a Lyft dri­ver is a gig work­er. She does work ‘with­out an ongo­ing com­mit­ment’ and finds that work via a mar­ket­place. A Job­Board­Doc­tor isn’t – because although he does work for ‘with­out an ongo­ing com­mit­ment’, he does not have access to an online mar­ket­place for job board con­sul­tants. He’s just an old-fash­ioned con­sul­tant. (Now do you see why the mar­ket­place part of this def­i­n­i­tion is ques­tion­able? If the Doc­tor obtained his work on a plat­form such as Upwork, he might very well be con­sid­ered a gig work­er. Def­i­n­i­tions, smef­i­ni­tions!)

So why isn’t gig work for every­one? Or even (I would argue)  peo­ple?

Well…

  • Health­care: If you’re unfor­tu­nate enough to live in a nation that does not cov­er your basic health­care, you will to pro­vide some sort of health­care insur­ance for your­self. Fact: health­care is expen­sive. Even well-com­pen­sat­ed gig work­ers, such as those in tech or health­care, will find that cov­er­ing their health­care costs ‘out of pock­et’ to be chal­leng­ing. So if you want to be a gig work­er, live some­where with uni­ver­sal health­care – or just make a lot of mon­ey!
  • Retire­ment: For those who envi­sion a care­free retire­ment, gig work may not be the answer – unless they are dis­ci­plined. With­out the won­der of pay­roll deduc­tion, aside a por­tion of earn­ings for a retire­ment fund can be chal­leng­ing. Not impos­si­ble, but…just ask your Door­dash per­son how their retire­ment sav­ings are going.
  • Reg­u­lar­i­ty: If you like pre­dictable income, gig work may not be your first choice. ‘Nuff said.
  • Pri­ma­ry income: The biggest defend­ers of the gig econ­o­my avoid talk­ing about the pre­ced­ing points by claim­ing that gig work is ‘just extra income’ for those who are already work­ing a ‘reg­u­lar job’. But esti­mates indi­cate that from 50% to 75% of gig work­ers rely on gigs as their pri­ma­ry source of income.
  • Less income: One doc­u­ment­ed effect of the mar­ket­places is that they tend to dri­ve down the of work for employ­ers. In oth­er words, over time, gig work­ers less income for the same work.

So who ben­e­fits from gig work?

  • Employ­ers: Whether it’s you get­ting a ride to the bar, or Google mov­ing 30% of its work­force to con­trac­tor sta­tus, as an employ­er you get more for less. Con­sid­er that the ben­e­fits men­tioned above typ­i­cal­ly con­tribute 25–40% of the total com­pen­sa­tion cost for a ‘real’ employ­ee – then chop that off when a gig work­er is used instead. Real savings…for the employ­er.
  • Mar­ket­places: What, did you think mar­ket­places did it for free? They get a slice of the action, of course.
  • Some gig work­ers: If you have an in-demand skill, few com­peti­tors, and are will­ing to hus­tle, you can prob­a­bly do bet­ter than a tra­di­tion­al employ­ee. Prob­a­bly. But don’t for­get to fac­tor in those extra costs! (Also, have a sup­ply of tran­quil­iz­ers avail­able for those times when work is scarce!).

You may be won­der­ing by now – why did I  write this post? You prob­a­bly know most, if not all, of the above. You’re in the indus­try, after all! Well…I just think it’s use­ful every now and then to step back and take a hard look at the imbal­ance in pow­er between employ­er and employ­ee. The scales have always been weight­ed in favor of the employ­er. The push to ‘gigi­fy’ work is sim­ply mak­ing the imbal­ance worse. Is that fair? No. But more impor­tant­ly, is it good for soci­ety over­all if work­ers get paid less and less? I would sug­gest that it isn’t.

And that, my friends, is where I’ll end. Some­thing to think about.

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