Gig workers around the globe

One disease, many pathologies.

My 2010 YA science fiction novel For the Win imagines a global solidarity movement among precarious gig workers paid to “gold farm” inside massively multiplayer online games.

https://craphound.com/category/ftw/

The kids who do this work realize they have more in common with each other than their bosses, and form a global syndicalist union called the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web (IWWW) or “Webblies.”

Gold farming remains a source of exploitative labor, xenophobic in-game violence, and acts of solidarity, but it’s only a tiny sliver of the true gig economy, which started with traditional low-waged delivery and driving work and has spread to MDs.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018915121/video-gaming-the-system

“The Global Gig Workers” is a new, important report on the gig economy around the world, published by Rest of World. It’s grounded in a survey of 4,500 gig workers in 15 countries, backstopped by seven profiles of workers in seven countries.

https://restofworld.org/2021/the-global-gig-workers/

The package includes a dive into the small coterie of investors that are behind the drive to export the gig economy to every nation on earth, delving into how…