Hightower:What does it Mean to “Gig” American Workers?

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/05/12/mean-gig-american-workers/

This is part of the new “gig economy — the latest corporate buzz-phrase from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. CEOs are hailing a Brave New Workplace in which we lucky worker bees no longer have to be suck in traditional jobs with traditional hours, traditional middle-class pay scales, traditional benefits, traditional job security, and all those other fusty “traditionals” of the old workplace, In fact, in the gig economy, you’re not even bothered with having a workplace. Rather, you’ll be “liberated” to work in a series of short-term jobs in many places, always being on-call through a mobile app on your smart phone or through a temp agency. How exciting is that?

Well, they use “exciting” in the sense of distressing and nerve-wracking. The gig economy means you’re on your own — you’re not an employee, but an “independent contractor,” with no rights and no union. You might have lots of calls to work this week, but there’ll be many weeks with no calls. Don’t get sick, injured or wreck your car, for no health care or workers’ comp are provided. A pension? Your retirement plan is called “adios chump.”

This “alternative work arrangement” is not a futuristic concept — it’s already here and spreading fast. And it’s not just ride-hiring gigs either. Some 16 percent of U.S. workers are now in this on-call, temporary, part-time, low-pay, you’re-on-your-own economy, up from only 10 percent a decade ago. Corporate chieftains (backed by the economists and politicians they purchase) are creating what they call a workforce of non-employees for one reason: Greed. It directly transfers more money and power from workaday families into the coffers of moneyed elites.

Their gig economy is aptly named, for “gigs” are crude four-hook fishing devices that are dragged by commercial fleets through schools of fish to impale them, haul them in, and cash in on the pain. And if you don’t think the gig economy is painful, why don’t you ask the 10,000 Uber and Lyft workers in Austin how they feel about it?

[Warpy]

1. Gigs are also musical engagements, usually by the night or if you're lucky, by the 3 or 4 night

weekend. Job security and benefits are the same as in temp work so the name is apt.

Unless temp workers start to organize, it's going to happen exactly that way. If they find the word "union" unpalatable, then organize them into skilled worker guilds.

Corporate temp agencies typically pocket half what a client pays for a worker. That has to stop.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

3. Exactly.

I was gonna post "a gig is what I've done with every single weekend for the past couple months".

[djean111]

2. My last couple of IT (QA) contracts, some years back -

the contracts bound ME for six months, but the contracting firm had the right to cancel at any time. Both got cancelled three months early because the jobs went to Chennai.

Years and years ago - had a most interesting interview - a large company had outsourced all of its QA to India - and now they were looking for someone to manage the eighty-person group in India - from here in Florida. Seems things were NOT going well at all. I was going to take a shot at it, but had never managed more than fifteen people, and they found someone with more management experience. Don't know how it all turned out, but it was all I could do to stay polite when the person interviewing me whined and complained about the (non-) quality of the work.

Used to get work from oDesk, it is called something else now. Lots of short-term "gigs".