Who Does the Gig Economy Really Benefit?

The answer might (not) surprise you.

There’s an awful lot in Nathan Heller’s look at the gigging economy in the New Yorker and how it’s either the future of or the end of work as we know it, but what stuck out to me was this, about a woman named Caitlin Connors — a woman who makes a living by renting her Williamsburg, Brooklyn apartment on AirBnb in order to pursue other dreams like travelling and the art of being a “creative,” defined however you’d like.

Many dreamy young people, like Caitlin Connors, see unrealized opportunity wherever they go. Some, in their careers, end up as what might be called hedgers. These are programmers also known as d.j.s, sculptors who excel as corporate consultants; they are Instagram-backed fashion mavens, with a TV pilot on the middle burner. They are doing it for the money, and the love, and, like the overladen students they probably once were, because they are accustomed to a counterpoint of self. The hedged career is a kind of gigging career — custom-assembled, financially diffuse, defiant of organizational constraint — and its modishness is why part-time Lyft driving or weekend TaskRabbit-ing has found easy cultural acceptance. But hedging is a luxury, available to those who have too many appealing options in life. It gestures toward the awkward question of whom, in the long run, the revolution-minded spirit of the nineteen-sixties really let off the leash.

The gig economy is supposed to help everyone in theory. In reality, it’s trapping wealth and opportunity in the same rarefied bubble that it always was. When you use Handy, a cleaning service you access from an app on your phone, to hire someone to come deep clean your apartment before your mother shows up, you could be taking a job away from someone else whose services are available via more traditional channels — word of mouth, or those fliers you see at coffeeshops and on telephone poles sometimes, with slips of paper bearing a phone number for you to tear away and save.

Instead of simply driving wealth down, it seemed, the gigging model was helping divert traditional service-worker earnings into more privileged pockets — causing what Schor calls a “crowding out” of people dependent on such work. That distillation-coil effect, drawing wealth slowly upward, is largely invisible.

The great hope of the gig economy is that it would give the working class a way to take a little more control of their lives by affording them the luxury of making their own schedules. This is the democratization they strive for, but what you get is something else entirely.

Instead of scrubbing bathrooms at the Hilton, you can earn directly, how and when you want. Such thinking, though, presumes that gigging people and the old working and service classes are the same, and this does not appear to be the case. A few years ago, Juliet B. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College, interviewed forty-three mostly young people who were earning money from Airbnb, Turo (like Airbnb for car rentals), and TaskRabbit. She found that they were disproportionately white-collar and highly educated…

But, what if you’re in the gig economy becuase you love it? What if you’re in it for the thrill? Here’s how you should prepare for your future.

Ideally, gig workers should plan not to retire. (Beyond Airbnb hosting, Mulcahy sees prospects for aging millennials in app-based dog-sitting.) If they must retire, they should prepare. Mulcahy suggests bingeing on benefits when they come. Fill your dance card with doctors while you’re on employee insurance. Go wild with 401(k) matching — it will come in handy.

Is the Gig Economy Working?

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