We perpetrate a swindle every time we use that hip phrase “the gig economy” to describe the modern labour market. If we wanted to be accurate, we could call it the “piece-rate” or the “precarious” economy. If we wanted to be polemical, we would call it the “rapacious” or the “boss-takes-all” economy. Silicon Valley’s success in prompting us to talk of “the gig economy” instead suggests that exploited men and women are the equivalent of rock stars, nipping into a club for a surprise session one night and heading off to Glastonbury the next. Far from being beaten down by lives of grinding insecurity, workers are freewheeling bohemians liberated from the routines that tied down their boring parents.
By allowing the myth that drudgery is freedom to pass unchallenged, we have sold out our fellow citizens so thoroughly they no longer even have the language to describe their predicament.
In this exceptional book, James Bloodworth sets out to work among “that now permanent class of people who live a fearful and tumultuous existence characterised by an almost total subservience to the whims of their employers”. While he was walking the miles of corridors in Amazon’s Rugeley warehouse, a comparison between today’s gig economy and yesterday’s Soviet Union hit him. All around were admonishments “to workers to feel joyful at the prospect of struggle”. Socialist realism had mutated into corporate uplift. In a Staffordshire warehouse the size of 10 football pitches, feelgood slogans were plastered next to pictures of beaming workers. “We love coming to work and miss it when we are not here!” they announced.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
