Meet the new workstyle, same as the old workstyle?
The “gig economy” and “working from home” are new phrases for old-fashioned working conditions. What can we learn from our elders’ experience?
Stories about the real or imaginary rise of the “gig economy” abound these days.
Google “working from home” and you get billions of results.
Some of those stories tout the work style’s liberating possibilities and greater profit margins for employers. Others emphasize lower benefits, financial instability, and a loss of community. But few of them mention two big, relevant facts:
We’ve tried that style before. And most people rejected it.
Not long ago, the majority of American adults (and a lot of children) were gig workers and/or worked at home.
Since then, most of them voted with their feet to spurn those working conditions in favor of working outside the house, for salaries or mostly-fixed hours and wages.
My grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t use today’s terminology. What we now call the “gig economy,” they called “piece work.” Working from home was often simply “working on the family farm” or “homemaking.” And, in their primes — even as recently as when my parents came of age — tens of millions of Americans did both of those jobs.
People often used the words “drudgery” and “isolation”to describe those experiences. Thanks to my grandmother’s stories, I can understand why, after working as a teenage telephone operator in her home, she surreptitiously boarded a train to elope with a man she had never met in person. And the tales that man (my grandfather) told of the desperate poverty he encountered in his doctor rounds in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains 90 years ago disabused me of the romance of the pastoral life.
I don’t bring this up to argue against the idea of a gig economy or of working at home. After all, I choose to work at home a lot. The nature of my work has a lot in common with that of a freelance writer or programmer.
Instead, I want to encourage more thinking about the best of what those work styles have to offer…and how to avoid the problems of the past.
Here are three suggestions:
1. Make personal connections as easy as possible.
A gig life or a work-at-home life can be very lonely and isolated. That’s not healthy for individuals or society.
So, anything we can do to make it easier for people to communicate, the better.
In today’s world, that means enabling more people to use broadband service, the door to the Internet.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, at least 24 million Americans (about 7 percent of the population) don’t have access to broadband. The real number is probably much higher. Tens of millions more can only get speeds that are a step up from old-school dial-up rates. They’re unable to stream files larger than the hard-drive of the computer I owned 20 years ago. Other people’s access is limited by caps on their service.
With the demise (hopefully just temporary) of net neutrality, all of us may soon get slower service, if we or our favorite websites don’t pony up more cash.
What are the consequences of living without broadband?
As a recent article in Vice described:
“The problem is that, increasingly, the tools we use in our daily lives are moving online, sometimes exclusively so…A lack of internet is forcing many young people to move away, fleeing their home states altogether to find modern career opportunities. It prevents areas already hard-hit by the demise of other industries, like coal, from finding new ways to make money online or telecommuting. A lack of internet access hurts businesses, hinders education, prevents people from getting jobs, and can even be life-threatening, as emergency services increasingly rely on internet-connected communications and documentation.”
National and local governments have done a lot to subsidize increased access to broadband. The stimulus package passed in 2009 alone provided $7.9 billion. But as the statistics above show, there is still a long way to go.
2. Incentivize socially-useful jobs, not bad ones.
I’m a pretty lucky guy when it comes to the gig parts of my job: computer programming and writing blogs like this. They contribute to the well-being of our society…or so I am told. And that makes the work’s ups and downs and occasional isolation barely noticeable.
But millions of Americans don’t have that good fortune. In large part, that’s due to our government being far more prone to subsidize and encourage jobs with little value to our society as a whole, while demeaning work of far greater import.
Take the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) law, one of the largest and most broadly popular federal program for lifting able-bodied adults and their dependents out of poverty. The basic idea is that, if you get paid for work, but earn less than roughly enough to meet the federally-defined poverty level, you’ll get a subsidy — in the form of a tax refund — of up to about $6,000, depending on how many children you have and how much income you earn.
But the EITC doesn’t treat all work the same.
Get a paycheck for working the french fryer at the local fast food joint? You’re eligible.
Moving boxes at the Amazon warehouse? You’re in.
But taking care of a sick parent or child, something for which you’d get paid good money if you were helping a stranger? You’re out of luck.
If we’re going to pick winners and losers when using our tax dollars (and let’s not kid ourselves by thinking that doesn’t happen all the time), I want my money going to the caretaker over the french fryer.
As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “It’s not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you being industrious about?”
3. Encourage the “Right to Repair”
When I was a child, my uncle was a car mechanic who worked out of a primitive garage near his home. (For anyone under the age of 55, the word “primitive” may not sufficiently describe how low-tech his operation was. For example, instead of a mechanized lift to raise the car to inspect the under chassis, he crawled into a deep hole dug beneath the car.)
He was essentially a gig worker, repairing all makes and models that customers happened to bring by. Millions more like him repaired cars, clocks, pianos, clothing, you name it.
Today, when it comes to mechanical things, it seems there are hardly any itinerant repairmen or women around. Plumbers, carpenters, and the like are still out there — and my wife has been terrific in finding good ones for our house — but it’s nothing like back in the day.
This isn’t just a result of the increasing technical sophistication of cars and the myriad electronic devices that we use every day. It certainly takes more money now to own and operate the necessary diagnostic equipment, and that makes it much harder for a working-class kid like my uncle to go off on his own.
But while he would have figured out the repairing part of the business pretty quickly, laws and court decisions are making it increasingly illegal for someone like him to even set up a repair business.
Take the case of Eric Lundgren, who recently started a 15-month sentence in a federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon. His crime? He distributed software he wrote himself, which allowed people to restore their Microsoft operating system when their computers crashed and they had lost their original discs. Because of obsolete laws, Lungren was sent to jail for giving away software that Microsoft also distributed for free. But using Lungren’s product meant that customers didn’t have to trek to Best Buy or an “authorized” repair shop to pay $180 to do the work.
That needs to change.
The blogger known as “Stilgherrian” at ZDNet once defined the gig economy as “the current sounds-good-but-not-really buzzphrase to describe what happens to work when your job is something that lasts for 10 minutes, thanks to people’s working lives being managed through hired-for-the-moment-then-dumped apps”.
When Thoreau wrote his more famous words, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he was a first-hand witness of our country’s first great migration from farm to factory, in north-central Massachusetts. He knew well the human tragedy of a job and life without purpose, without social value.
Doing gig work and working at home need not be wastelands for the soul. If we learn from our elders, maybe this time we won’t get fooled again.
