Gig work: A choice or a prison?
I’ve been a gig worker for almost a decade, and I don’t know how I can stop, said Sarah Hunter Simanson in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s hard to find a good job, and if I get one, I don’t know how I’ll balance it with my responsibilities as a mom.” I went to school to be a teacher, but “gigging’s perks of flexibility and control became necessities when my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.” Since then, “I’ve piecemealed together part-time jobs that include private tutor, substitute teacher, fitness instructor, story-time program leader, and freelance writer.” I was always “too grateful for a gig” to complain about “the inconsistency, low and slow pay, instability, and lack of benefits.” There are 64 million people with me in this “all-consuming sinkhole.”
There are unhappy gig workers, but don’t believe that “gig workers have broadly united to complain that they have been ‘misclassified,’” said Kerry Jackson in City Journal. Quite the opposite: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “independent contractors ‘overwhelmingly’ favor their employment arrangement (79 percent) to a traditional one (9 percent).” The Biden administration has been eager to “eliminate gig work” with new rules that would reclassify more workers as employees. It’s following a model created by California—Julie Su, the acting Labor Department secretary, is a former California labor commissioner—and trying to take national California’s “hostile attitude toward worker freedom.”
What comes to your mind when you think of independent small businesses? asked Terri Gerstein in The New York Times. Does washing dishes fit the bill? The city of Denver recently issued citations to two staffing agencies that “place workers in a range of hospitality positions” and misclassify them as independent contractors. Among them are “servers, bartenders, line and prep cooks, and, yes, dishwashers.” The Denver cases “demonstrate the spread of the exploitative gig business model far beyond Uber drivers and DoorDash food deliverers.” If corporations can skirt those protections and benefits “just by hiring workers via an app and giving them a modicum of scheduling flexibility, workers are in big trouble.”
The attack on gig work is a misguided effort to “save workers from their own choices,” said Eric Boehm in Reason. Backers of new rules think they are helping workers. But the workers don’t feel that way. Since California’s worker classification law took effect at the beginning of 2020, “self-employment has fallen by 10.5 percent.” But that hasn’t been matched by any increase in “the number of employees classified as full employees.” Many workers, it seems, “would choose to exit the workforce rather than accept a more traditional employment arrangement.”