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 they describe the business opportunity gig work represents.

https://restofworld.org/2021/global-gig-workers-investors-behind-gig-work-model/

It won’t surprise you to learn that what attracts investors to gig work is the potential to scale up a company at workers’ expense. Building the app and bribing, coercing or convincing local authorities to allow it to operate is a fixed cost; running the service is cheap.

The capital costs — bikes, trucks, cars, phones, data-plans — are all borne by workers, who, thanks to systematic worker misclassification, are treated as independent contractors who are not entitled to benefits or workplace protection.

And while the workers must buy expensive capital equipment and have their days scripted to a fine degree by the electronic nag of the app, the company offers them no assurance that compliance and performance will be rewarded with a fair wage.