Guardian gig economy
On Wednesday, the Guardian published an article about the realities of producing Google Assistant. They earn low wages and are routinely forced to work unpaid overtime. Their concerns over working conditions have been repeatedly dismissed. Sometimes humans workers are the artificial intelligence.
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Photos by Nathan Cyprys. Going freelance is liberating, and new technologies make it possible for more and more professionals to jump in. Some even think they will make more money.
But something was missing. Catharines and Oakville, Ont. Nevertheless, he persisted. Pollock eventually quit his job and offered his services as a freelance Web developer. Pollock got his big break, when, in , the Super Bowl asked him to do its app. A few years in, his brother joined him, and now he has two others working with him in a small office in west-end Toronto.
That group has grown to 1, strong. Pollock was a relatively early adopter of what is now a major trend—a mass migration toward freelancing. One recent study, commissioned by the Ontario government, found jobs outside the traditional mould, such as freelance jobs, to be growing at nearly twice the rate of more conventional ones. Writers and actors have long worked this way, hopping from one assignment to the next.
But this way of working is rapidly moving out of bohemia and into the mainstream. Increasing numbers of eminently employable individuals in professional lines of work—IT, human resources, marketing, finance, accounting—are moving from gig to gig, untethered to a traditional employer.
In , the human resources consulting firm Randstad surveyed Canadian workers, finding that just over one in four of them worked independently, with IT professionals and engineers like Pollock identified as those most likely to work this way. Based on a recent survey conducted in the U.
The professional networking site LinkedIn estimated that some 43 per cent of the American workforce now does at least some freelancing. Many have this relatively precarious gig-to-gig existence thrust on them, as, over the last three decades, employers have continually outsourced work that used to be done exclusively by employees.
Not only that, the way young people break into their chosen industries has profoundly changed. According to a recent StatsCan study, in employers structured nearly half of their entry-level positions as part-time work less than 30 hours a week while one in three entry-level jobs were temporary contracts, with set end dates. And in a climate of flatlining salaries, potential freelancers are actually expecting to be better off on their own.
In a survey by the cloud-based accounting software company FreshBooks, 67 percent of individuals from a cross-section of professions who plan to leave salaried work for self-employment expect to earn more by freelancing.
FreshBooks, like its competitors Xero, Sage and others, has skin in the game. Technological advances have enabled this type of work in other ways. A proliferation of apps like TaskRabbit, Uber and Lyft speedily match workers possessing certain skills and assets with consumers in need of them. Have a few extra hours in your week?
Have an apartment that often sits vacant? Want to start a weekend bookkeeping business? You can register on one of these sites, or buy an off-the-shelf piece of software, and develop a side-hustle—another suddenly ubiquitous term. These new terms all aim to describe aspects of this explosion in freelancing. Surveys typically show that more than half of all respondents prefer to work this way, even if the jobs and monetary rewards are less predictable.
The British academic Guy Standing coined a term to describe these workers: the precariat. An English graduate based in Oakland, Calif. She shoots long-form ads using documentary film techniques. The dynamic image is for me. And so I work with startups, some larger organizations, to tell their stories.
She also co-founded a non-profit that brings men and women together to discuss gender issues. Her words echo those of one of the big books to come out of s America, Charles A. This out-of-nowhere multinational WeWork—it started in New York in and now has offices all around the globe—certainly wraps itself up in that free-to-be-you-and-me spirit. I speak to several who use one of the two Toronto offices as a base.
Among them is Brian Sekandi, who left a major executive-placement firm to go out on his own, and has since moved from one retainer to the next, often working with companies helping to figure out their personnel needs after a merger or other major change.
Like many people in their 30s, when he needs something in his personal or professional life, he also makes copious use of the apps that have set up online marketplaces for goods and services.
A recent Pew Research Center study found that 72 percent of Americans had used on-demand services via such platforms as these, and that one-third of those under 45 had used four or more. In the Bay Area, where I live, and from which many of these apps emanate, you can use Handy for home repairs, Postmates for deliveries and Fiverr for, really, almost any odd jobs, seemingly the odder the better.
It was recently purchased by Ikea for an undisclosed sum, and some U. The cleaner I hired, Kristen Carranza, had a nearly percent satisfaction rating from past clients. She arrived on the appointed day, bucket in hand, and went at my fridge and freezer with a vengeance.
She decided to strike out on her own, setting up a music promotion and artist management business nearer to where she grew up, in the Bay Area. She does a great job, and the pay seems fair, but something bothers me about our interaction. With just a slender digital connection between us, Carranza came into my house, bearing only her bucket and her good attitude for protection.
For women especially, risk is endemic to this relatively unregulated, unscripted mode of work. A former English professor based in Indianapolis, Tyra Seldon left academia to set up her own writing and editing business, going from one project to the next.
Early on, she agreed to meet at a restaurant with a writer about editing his manuscript. He kept asking her personal questions, while she tried to turn the conversation to business matters, like the contract and the deposit. She left and turned down the work, then received a nasty text in return.
There was no HR department I could talk to. This is a question that Andrew Cash has spent a lot of time pondering, both personally and professionally. He currently runs a Toronto-based national non-profit called the Urban Worker Project, which aims to help, in various ways, the growing numbers of us who work outside the traditional employer-employee relationship.
No more. His fledgling organization connects these workers with one another, while also advocating with law- and policymakers to put in place new protections for freelancers. How do they manage the insecurity that currently comes with this territory?
And so, after ten years of going gig to gig with a fair amount of success, Pollock and his small shop have come up with an app, Audiogram, that pairs video to podcast sound bites. With software as a service, you can count on a solid monthly payment.
Cash had to stop work. Zurry Donevan has built her photography business from the ground up. After a bicycle crash left him paralyzed, venture capitalist John Ruffolo is making a comeback many said was impossible. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email. Neal Pollock seemed to be on his way. In , he was a twenty something engineering graduate with a job at a software company that serviced the Canadian mutual fund industry. Is the gig economy sustainable?
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Gig economy workers to get employee rights under EU proposals | The Guardian
A decade ago a ride-hailing service called UberCab launched in Silicon Valley. It has never made a profit. The business model relies on shareholders to subsidise cheap rides so that the company can squeeze out rivals and establish a monopoly. After it floated on the stock market, its two founders became billionaires. While the owners of Uber have become immensely wealthy, the people who drive its cars have paid a heavy price. They can work up to 30 hours a week before breaking even. Hundreds went on strike in May to protest against poor pay and conditions.
The AI gig economy is coming for you
Gone are the days of working from nine to five in a cradle-to-grave job. The proliferation of freelancing and gig work — especially through major gig economy employers such as Uber, Lyft, Turo or Fiverr — shows this. This is often referred to as the gig economy. So, how can we define the gig economy? Broadly speaking, the gig economy is a free-market system in which companies look to work with independent contractors or freelancers as opposed to hiring full-time workers. In this economy, workers have temporary or part-time positions, allowing them to frequently change employers or work for several different businesses at the same time. The rise of this economy is closely connected to advances in technology and the trend of working remotely as so-called digital nomads. This provides even more flexibility for both freelancers and clients. Statistics provided by the Bureau of Labor show there were 55 million US gig workers in
Gig Economy Statistics: Demographics and Trends in 2022
The gig economy might not be sustainable , according to a new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, which finds that the number of workers joining has declined dramatically over the last two years. The growth of what the report refers to as the online platform economy OPE has certainly been contributing to the changing nature of work. The report, which draws on a sample of over , individuals who received income from the OPE between October and June from one or more of 42 different platforms, explores the dynamics of participation and earnings in order to better understand why growth has slowed. Participation on labor platforms those through which participants perform discrete tasks, such as Uber has doubled year on year , but participation on capital platforms through which participants sell goods or rent assets, such as Airbnb has leveled off.
Gig economy
In a massive victory for ADCU and Worker Info Exchange, group of UK drivers and a driver from Portugal supported by them have won an historic victory in their legal battle for greater transparency of algorithmic management practices used by Uber and Ola Cabs. The drivers were seeking to access their personal data from Ola and Uber as well as the right to transparency to algorithmic management. Gig economy workers score historic digital rights victory against Uber and Ola Cabs. A group of UK drivers and a driver from Portugal have won an historic victory in their legal battle for greater transparency of algorithmic management practices used by Uber and Ola Cabs. The cases were taken before the Amsterdam District Court as both Ola and Uber control driver data from the Netherlands.
Gig-working in England and Wales more than doubles in five years
Executive Summary. The gig economy has had a drastic impact on the nature of employment. The traditional paradigm of full-time, stable individual employment is being challenged by on-demand freelance contractor work. Consequently, certain protections and benefits that employees usually enjoy are not afforded to workers in the gig economy. This paper explains what the gig economy is, how it functions and the implications it has on labour rights.
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We must reshape our laws so the major employers of the future are forced to treat workers with respect. All kinds of other public offices were up for election too. And in California, electors had an additional choice to make: whether to approve Proposition 22, a referendum on whether ride-hail and delivery companies think outfits such as Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo should get an exemption from California employment law that would allow them to continue treating workers as independent contractors rather than as employees with rights that come with conventional employment. For the trade unions and the civil society groups who opposed the proposition, the outcome is somewhere between a disappointment and a disaster. The gig economy, in one form or another, is here to stay and we need to find a way of making it compatible with social equity and human dignity.
Creating an impoverished dystopia is a political choice, not a robot vs. I know right? We're living in the worst era ever. Everything is always getting worse and worse over time. The longer ago it was, the better it was. People are getting more and more impoverished ever since machines began replacing human labor.
However, despite the impact being widespread across all sectors of the economy, workers in the gig economy are at a particular financial disadvantage. Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced increased benefits for the self-employed at the daily briefing on March 20 th but did not guarantee their wages. This has understandably left those people who are self-employed, e.
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