The gig economy

views on work — By Bob Riel on February 13, 2009 at 2:56 pm

So there’s finally a catchphrase for the growing number of people who try to stitch a living out of wandering from project to project. Marci Alboher wrote a book a while back and she has a blog about people who have slash/careers, or multiple vocations. But now Tina Brown has created a mini-media storm with an article about what she has dubbed “The Gig Economy.”

No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got Gigs.

Gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together to make what they refer to wryly as “the Nut”—the sum that allows them to hang on to the apartment, the health-care policy, the baby sitter, and the school fees.

Gigs: They’re all that’s standing between them and…what? The outer-outer boroughs? Eating what’s left of the 401(k)? Moving to Alaska? Out-and-out destitution?

To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What’s new is the way it’s hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.

Brown ended up doing an NPR interview about the topic, ABC News chimed in with tips for accidental freelancers, and before long almost everyone was writing about the gig economy. Newsweek had one of the more prominent stories, asking “are freelance and part-time gigs the future?”

In this economy, a job isn’t just a job: It’s a pastiche of part-time gigs, project contracts and fill-in freelance work…Some 2.5 million full-time jobs have evaporated in the last 13 months, contributing to what’s being called the “gig economy.” But there is a convergence of other, more developed trends at play as well. Tight-budgeted company managers long ago embraced outsourcing to only pay for what they can use. A new generation of workers has 24/7 connectivity, lacks corporate loyalty, and thinks like mavericks. Put them together and you get gigonomics.

Equally important in the Newsweek story, though, are the challenges and policy issues it raised. Let’s face it, our economy and our safety net are still a relic of the time when people went to work for one company and stayed there for an extended period of time.

In a freelance-based job market, talented, skilled and energetic people can still do great work and make good money. But those highly qualified workers who aren’t good at the business side of selling themselves, over and over, can suffer. Even connected, ambitious, talented giggers can hit slow periods, and that’s where the gigonomics start to pinch. “You have to bring in a project and then the project ends, and then you have to bring in another project,” says Challenger. “That can be a difficult time. It can make you doubt yourself when you might be good.”

And it isn’t just about feelings. The complete lack of a safety net for independent workers is the key policy challenge of the gigonomic era, says Horowitz, who received a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for her advocacy work in this area. Her organization is pressing President Obama to include relief for self-employed workers in his stimulus plan. She is lobbying for a savings system in which contingent workers could get some government-matching funds when they put rainy-day money away during fat times.

She would also like to see other policy initiatives aimed at the independent workforce, including more non-employer mechanisms for affordable group health insurance, flexible retirement plans, and tax breaks to address the additional Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by the self-employed.

Just wondering how many of you are part of the gig economy, and what are your thoughts on this topic?