Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work

Journalist Sarah Kessler offers us a deep and nuanced view of independent work (aka The Gig Economy, freelancing, etc.) in her new book, Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work.She follows the companies, workers, and social systems engaged in the growth of gig work. Upwork, Uber, Mechanical Turk, Gigster, Managed by Q, Postmates, Handy, and many others provide the backdrop for her analysis. She takes us through the growth of gig work through to late 2017.Human and NuancedWhere she considers the reality of expert Turkers (a term for the crowdsourced workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform), she offers the story of Kristy Milland (see a short form version in Wired) as she sets a goal of earning $100 a day, but at a physical cost given repetitive stress injuries. Milland eventually becomes an advocate for workers, considers starting a gig-work cooperative, and by the end of her story has been admitted to two law schools. The example allows us to see the realities of the system, and the thought process of smart and savvy Milland as she tries to build a new way of working.The story of the founding, pivoting, and growth of Managed by Q was all new to me. “The first platform for office management” started as an idea as a platform for office management tasks (cleaning, facilities, etc.) using subcontractors, but moved to a regular employee model. This was prompted when Starbucks executive, Dervala Hanley, introduced co-founder, Dan Teran, to the book, The Good Jobs Strategy, by Zeynep Ton. Unions, employee safety nets, and government perspectives all flow through the case. (Managed by Q now has a hybrid model as they scale - back to using subcontractors in some areas. By Kessler's last visit with Teran, 1000 employees are noted and 220 of their hourly employees had just received stock grants.)These are just two of the detailed examples she follows. Kessler thanks her sources in the Acknowledgements section and I add my thanks here. The time and honesty they offered let us all be better prepared for the future.What’s Next?The variety and depth of Kessler’s examples offer a window into the issues we all should have in mind as we plan our own engagement with independent work and workers. Definitions of employment are up in the air as are questions of how best to educate people for our futures of work. Reading Gigged allows you to see many of these issues in context.Kessler offers her own conclusion via the Epilogue:“At the end of it, I don’t think Silicon Valley was wrong to attempt to restructure the job. Our current model wasn’t working, and the startup spirit of experimentation was necessary. But attempting to tackle the problems of the job— and yes, delivering flexibility— without fixing the support structures around it can’t quite count as progress, and it certainly doesn’t look like innovation….The gig economy, it turns out, is not the on-demand improvement to the “future of work” that its creators once imagined. But it will play an important role in exemplifying what that future might look like, and the slow, hard work that we must do to prepare for it.”Other recommendations Thriving in the Gig Economy Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment

A few years ago, I thought about writing a book on the gig economy. On many levels, I knew that it was going to be a big deal and recent events have only underscored its importance.I'm glad that I didn't.I couldn't have done a better job than Sarah Kessler did. A gifted storyteller, she adroitly stitches together facts, key court verdicts, and human stories. This is no screed against the future of work. At the same time, though, Kessler asks tough questions about what we want out of society and what society owes us.Well done, Sarah.

The examples are very good - that said, if you live long enough everything comes around many times - I shock my 3rd Year UG Business class when I tell them their fashionable clothes were how in 1976 and 1992 and show pictures to make the point that perpective allows you to see what is new again rather than really new. My grandfather was a mining engineer so in the Great War as part of the Australian Imperial Force he was set to work building railways to transport English made ammunition from the coast across France to the Western Front and the closer they were to the Front, the riskier in became. When he came home in 1919, he took up being the driver/engineer on country trains (the isolation was very much appreciated) he created his own gig economy for the next 30 years - pick up a sheep when they stopped on the rail tracks, give to a butcher and distribute meat to all the other drivers at stations, and many others, the train was the internet of the time. This is a well researched book as to what the internet has done, good and bad, but there has been a gig ecomony since people opened bars along the Via Apia for the Roman legions heading to Gaul and Germania.

Just finished Gigged, by the brilliant writer Sarah Kessler. Over 6 years she reported on the rise of the gig economy, the countless enumerations on Uber’s model (Uber but for cat food!), and the folks who get swept into the promise of flexible work at good pay. Spoiler: most of them are disappointed by the gig economy, which wasn’t designed to empower the kinds of people who really *need* to work to survive. Sarah interweaves several intimate stories: one woman writes scripts to get alerts in the middle of the night so she can snatch jobs faster, then spends hours labeling products on Amazon; another man works hard from his trailer in rural Arkansas fielding customer service calls about broken air conditioners, then come autumn is out of a job, all the while competing with overseas operators who will work for far less money. It’s bleak, people. But some iteration of the gig economy represents the future of work — at least until the robots catch up.

I’m a professor of labor and employment policy who studies the ‘gig economy’. Of all the books I have read on this topic, I would consider ‘Gigged’ among the very best. This book demonstrates that “gig” platforms are complex and span a variety of different types of work and working relationships. It is well written and researched, drawing on both individual stories and academic research. For anyone who is interested in learning more about how technology is changing the nature of work, I highly recommend this book.

Poorly written, repeating itself, not a single thing that's helpful, glorifying Uber garbage

I am a voracious reader of things which I feel are very important. This is a very necessary read. Uber and Lyft have changed the game when it comes to employment. There is so much "noise" in the newspapers and other sources about the gig economy. One has to figure out for themselves what is necessary and what is not to do your job effectively. Like another other job, poor performance is a big problem which will have consequences in the long run. This book contains necessary information to help one succeed.

Interesante visión de futuro

O produto veio com algumas marcas de sujeira, não soube identificar o que é, mas é algo parecido com sangue ou ferrugem.