Ben Hant is a Senior Editor for the Bruin Political Review.

Over the summer, Hollywood writers took to the streets to protest unfair working conditions in the entertainment industry. The Writers’ Guild of America called on studios to provide reliable and fair jobs rather than short-term writing gigs that leave writers perpetually shuffling to find a new job [2]. This shift from long-term employment to short-term gigs, or the “gig economy”, is becoming increasingly common throughout American workplaces. Silicon Valley start-ups like Uber and Lyft first popularized the labor practice, hosting drivers as “independent contractors” rather than full-time employees. While defining the gig economy is difficult, its key hallmark is temporary employment that allows workers more flexibility to choose their hours but sacrifices job security [3]. Features of the gig economy are expanding to an alarming number of economic sectors, and this expansion threatens labor security and solidarity when the future of employment is uncertain.

Typically, when we talk about the gig economy, we draw a clear distinction between employees in the traditional economy and freelancers in the gig economy. Employees work regular hours, have benefits, and fill out W-2s while freelancers can choose their hours, pay for their own benefits, and fill out 1099s [4]. This dichotomy was convenient for the early gig economy, especially for the tech giants that created it. While tech industry leaders frequently cite increased flexibility and that their jobs provide work “on the side,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics found in 2017 that the majority of gig economy workers listed that job as their primary source of income [5]. The reality is that this distinction is incredibly profitable for companies as they do not have to provide consistent work or benefits. In fact, Uber’s profitability is dependent on them classifying their workers as freelancers [6]. 

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However, freelance work is no longer limited to the few sectors enabled by these tech unicorns. App-enabled work and other features of the gig economy have been steadily expanding into traditional professional, service, and manufacturing industries. A study by Upwork concluded that up to 39% of Americans were involved in some sort of freelance work [8]. For instance, graphic designers can easily perform independent contract work for clients over platforms like Fiverr or Upwork, allowing them to set their own prices and hours. For these types of professions, the gig economy can be ideal; the freedom of freelance work enables them to spend more time with their families or on other productive tasks, and their high pay allows them to weather through dips in demand for their service. By contrast, in service or manufacturing industries, many workers do not have high enough wages to allow them to continue making ends meet if they are out of work for a period of time. This leads many of them to pursue second or even third jobs in an attempt to replace the ubiquitous income security of the union jobs of forty years ago. The gig economy’s growth, therefore, represents a K-shape in that it can be incredibly beneficial for high-income earners while disempowering a large portion of those making lower incomes [9].

For many industries, even if they do not assume the typical model of the gig economy, they adopt features of the gig economy that similarly expand flexibility at the expense of job security and stability—they are part of the gig-adjacent economy. For instance, Amazon uses an app system that allows full time employees the ability to pick their shifts [10]. This means that employees pick up shifts incredibly quickly, and even though workers gain the ability to choose their shifts, they can no longer rely on consistent schedules—they can easily get stuck with the graveyard shift if they do not pick up the app in time [10]. Employees are often forced to sign worker flexibility contracts that can force them to give up crucial protections like minimum wage [11]. In Amazon’s case, they even collect large-scale data on employee productivity up to and including how often they use the bathroom. While their system does allow employees to earn time off, they can also take this time away for tardiness or unproductiveness. This “big data'' gives them potential cause to fire many employees at a moment’s notice. While these workers are still technically considered employees and do not fit into the contractor model of the traditional gig economy, the expansion of app-enabled work mimics the trends of the growing gig economy and functions in much the same way.

The primary benefit of the gig economy—flexibility—is a legitimate one. It is valuable for many people to be able to choose their own schedules so that they can manage other tasks and responsibilities. Yet, as the gig economy grows, this flexibility becomes increasingly entangled with the concept of “just-in-time staffing.” This is the idea that companies can easily adjust the number of people they have on staff for cyclical or seasonal fluctuations in demand. Further, the advent of big data that companies can use to analyze productivity allows them to determine the exact number of employees they need to make the greatest profit. While it allows them to eliminate some of the inefficiency of hiring full-time staff, it comes at the expense of employees’ job security—workers believe these jobs are permanent and secure when they are essentially treated as expendable, seasonal employees. Workers could be technically employed but go weeks without logging hours because their company determines that they are unneeded. Therefore, workers operate on the basis that they could be without income at a moment’s notice. This makes the job environment competitive and transient which is inhospitable to labor solidarity.

Both the typical gig economy and more nebulous app-enabled labor make workers’ schedules unreliable. It is much easier to create solidarity among coworkers that could eventually create the conditions to form a union or other collective action when they all know each other personally. With unpredictable schedules, employees do not see their colleagues regularly and thus have no sense of community at their workplace that would motivate them to organize. Further, because gig positions are transient, even if freelancers do consider organization, they or their coworkers could be fired or quit at any time, giving little incentive to collaborate for better conditions for everyone.

With workers’ hours and scheduling so inconsistent under gig economy-type jobs, they are left with a relatively simple choice. In order to create more job security, they could make an attempt to unionize which would require commitment from their coworkers, or they could take an additional job. The key difference between these two options is that collective action requires involving others, but a worker can choose to take another job entirely on their own. Ultimately, collective action would be better for all of them because they would be able to have more stable work without having to take on a second job. However, because the features of the gig economy make it more difficult for workers to communicate, they are often trapped in several demanding and low-paying jobs. Even if they would like to organize, doing so alone would be fruitless, and the conventions of the growing gig economy eliminate their ability to do so. This trapped structure benefits companies because they are able to extract a greater quantity of more profitable labor from having more low-paid employees rather than fewer highly paid and unionized ones. In this sense, the expanding gig economy is an inventive capitalist measure to keep productivity high off the backs of overworked laborers with consistently insecure employment.

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Fortunately, we have found a reliable and consistent tool that allows workers to continually bargain for better conditions even when the labor environment is constantly changing. The key difference between workers in the Writer’s Guild of America that took to the streets on Hollywood studio lots and the workers in most of the gig economy is that the WGA has a dedicated process for fighting for better rights and an organizing body that gives them a seat at the table. Therefore, when they are faced with the threats of automation and gig work, they have the power to fight it. Unions have been and will continue to be an incredibly effective tool for advancing the interests of the working class.

However, there are many hurdles facing unions in the gig and gig-adjacent economy. In the traditional gig economy, workers designated as “independent contractors” are not able to unionize. When courts attempted to intervene in California to designate these workers as employees, powerful tech companies pushed back hard. In 2020, tech giants like Uber and Lyft banded together in response to a California court injunction that would mandate these companies to treat their workers as employees by advancing Proposition 22 with $200 million in funding [13]. This direct proposition passed largely due to its immense funding and exempted these companies from treating their workers as employees. Across the country, the gig economy’s independent contractor status means that those in it cannot create unions that are protected by the National Labor Relations Board. Even worse, the terms of the proposition make it nearly impossible to be overturned. For those in the expanding parts of the gig economy,  geographically isolated locations often mean that each location must unionize independently which can be much more difficult. Even worse, some companies like Starbucks have taken to systematically shutting down stores that attempt to unionize, and companies around the country frequently use illegal and retaliatory union-busting tactics to prevent their employees from organizing [14]. 

In the US, the majority of unions involve singular companies or locations. However, this does not have to be the case. Unionizing entire industries offers significantly more solidarity and power for workers to bargain for better conditions. In much of Europe, this sectoral bargaining leads to higher union participation, and it extends the benefits associated with unions to more people [15]. Under this system, unions bargain at the sectoral level with industry representatives, and the government then applies their agreement to all of the workers in the sector. While this may not necessarily apply to independent contractors, it will ensure that despite the expansion of the gig-adjacent economy, workers still have an opportunity to be protected. Sectoral bargaining no longer places the impetus on workers to pursue collective action as they are already incorporated into a larger, government-supported bargaining structure. Under this system, the NLRB could reform its rules to allow independent contractors like drivers and food delivery providers to form a sectoral union that allows them to bargain for better treatment without necessarily forming a union themselves. When workers are already overburdened and undercompensated, the burden should not be on them to ensure that they are treated fairly. Sectoral bargaining frees them from this burden and empowers the government to protect workers across the country.

Empowering workers will be fundamental to the coming decades of uncertain labor outcomes amidst growing technological innovation. The gig economy threatens this empowerment and leaves people vulnerable to the uncertain times ahead. However, by adapting employment regulations to recognize labor rights even when the structure of modern employment changes, we can ensure that we protect the next generation of workers from whatever the labor economy may throw at them.