Employment contracts are by their nature asymmetrical. Although in principle contracts are made between two free and equal parties, when an employee signs one they enter into an unequal relationship. Work can be a source of identity, a prerequisite for social inclusion, and a marker of status and independence; historically, the employment contract has been contrasted with slavery, bondage and other forms of servitude. But workers’ movements have long argued that waged labour in general implies a kind of wage-slavery: it dominates as well as exploits. At the very least, it sets up a hierarchical relationship: having a job means being under the authority of an employer. Struggles for better working conditions – for proper remuneration, trade union representation, protection against discrimination, the right to time off for leisure, parenting or sickness – aim to mitigate the essential inequity of the employment contract and limit the power of the boss.
According to the sociologist Colin Crouch, the gig economy provides a new way of concealing employers’ authority. People who work for such online platforms as Uber, Lyft and Deliveroo are classed not as employees but as self-employed. They are supposedly flexible entrepreneurs, free to choose when they work, how they work and who they work for. In practice, this isn’t the case. Unlike performers in the entertainment industry (which gives the ‘gig’ economy its name), most gig workers don’t work for an array of organisations but depend for their pay on just one or two huge companies. The gig worker doesn’t really have much in common with the ideal of the entrepreneur – there is little room in their jobs for creativity, change or innovation – except that gig workers also take a lot of risks: they have no benefits, holiday or sick pay, and they are vulnerable to the whims of their customers. In many countries, gig workers (or ‘independent contractors’) have none of the rights that make the asymmetry of the employment contract bearable: no overtime, no breaks, no protection from sexual harassment or redundancy pay. They don’t have the right to belong to a union, or to organise one, and they aren’t entitled to the minimum wage. Most aren’t autonomous, independent free agents, or students, part-timers or retirees supplementing their income; rather, they are people who need to do gig work simply to get by.
What is new about the gig economy isn’t that it gives workers flexibility and independence, but that it gives employers something they have otherwise found difficult to attain: workers who are not, technically, their employees but who are nonetheless subject to their discipline and subordinate to their authority. The dystopian promise of the gig economy is that it will create an army of precarious workers for whose welfare employers take no responsibility. Its emergence has been welcomed by neoliberal thinkers, policymakers and firms who see it as progress in their efforts to transform the way work is organised.‘Standard employment’ is the formal name given to a non-temporary, full-time job secured by a contract. Today, the share of ‘non-standard employment’ in the labour market is growing. There are many kinds of non-standard and informal work, from self-employment to the unstable, unregulated and illegal work of the shadow economy. It takes different forms in different countries. In the UK, on-call contracts (whereby workers are on standby and can be called in to work at any time, even for short stints) and zero-hours contracts (whereby employers aren’t obliged to guarantee even a minimum number of working hours) are popular: an estimated 900,000 people worked under such arrangements in 2017. Across Europe, too, there has been an increase in ‘marginal jobs’ and in the use of contracts that expire before workers acquire full rights, like Germany’s ‘minijobs’ and ‘midijobs’ (which provide short hours and low pay, but are enough to disqualify workers from claiming unemployment benefits). At the same time, in advanced economies, the rights of ‘standard employees’ have been steadily eroded. Insecurity is the general condition of modern work. (...)
Even if standard employment turns out to be the historical exception, the erosion of workers’ security doesn’t mark a return to the capitalism of the Gilded Age. Modern precarity takes a distinctive form, which is a result of the major political and economic changes of the 1970s. As Crouch sees it, three of these changes are especially significant. First, the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, characterised as deindustrialisation or as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. As manufacturing declined, the enriched standard employment associated with it began to disappear. Second, the rise of digital and data technologies, which has made possible the intensification of workplace discipline and surveillance as well as new ways of working from home – a modern ‘putting-out’ system. The internet has enabled monopolies, but it has also decentralised work as well as deindustrialised it. Third, workers’ loss of power after the deregulation of finance. Under Thatcher and Reagan, corporations were reorganised to benefit shareholders, and finance was given the freedom to move to more advantageous regimes. Workers had no such freedom, and neither did conventional firms, whose buildings, equipment and working populations were settled in a particular place. All this changed the distribution of risk, to the detriment of workers. (...)
The very existence of a precarious workforce makes it possible for steady jobs to be undercut, work contracted out and workers set against one another. Crouch believes that the gig economy has a wider significance too. He picks out two contradictory models of capitalism. Market fundamentalists believe that the aim of capitalism is to achieve perfect markets; they reject oligopoly and propagate the the myth of the equal contract. Corporate capitalists, by contrast, are in favour of oligopoly and don’t care so much about ideal markets; they see the relation between employer and employee as closer to a master-servant dynamic (much modern labour law legally enshrines obedience to managerial authority). What the gig does, in Crouch’s view, is to ease the tension between the two models. It promises to fulfil the fantasy that we are all free in the marketplace, even in the labour market. When workers are no longer defined as employees, their interests are pushed outside the corporation altogether. They are also removed from union jurisdiction. Unions have, as one would expect, campaigned against the encroachments of the gig economy and the erosion of workers’ rights it entails. But they have sometimes been reluctant to organise the precarious workforce, even though precarious workers are among those most in need of union representation. It’s no surprise that, as a consequence, many precarious workers see ordinary workers – however poorly paid – as privileged; in some countries, Italy for example, they even support further labour market deregulation. Unions are starting to address this – by looking for ways to organise workers outside workplaces, by supporting new organisations led by precarious workers, by bringing legal cases to win rights for those workers – but progress is slow.
by Katrina Forrester, LRB | Read more:
Image: The Wealth of the Nation, Seymour Fogel
