Pop Goes the Gig Economy
Single Mothers are Getting Gobbled Up by Necroliberalism
“Yeah, sometimes I just gotta take two numbers. But if you tell anyone, I’ll stab you.” Jane’s* statement was followed by a slight head tilt and a gut-driven raspy chuckle that occupied her sunken cheeks. The joke didn’t quite land with me as I fixed rigid, committed to staring a hole through the blanche wall enclosing the public records office opposite us. Cue the Psycho violin screech. There we sat on the narrow-slated wooden bench, 8 am on some weekday morning, as I nervously thumbed my one own thin double-digit ticket. Mostly wishing Jane would somehow magically learn the parameters of personal space.
Evolving was my 22-year old self, a job juggling undergrad, as I tried to make sense of all my life choices that had landed me in sporadic gig jobs as a background researcher at the local courthouse. The work was inconsistent. Boring. But when I got the text approving a job the night before, I was always glad to jump at extra income. Armed with a pleasure read, a notebook with a catalog of names, a cosmic-print backpack and a frou-frou espresso beverage, I was out of my depths. I just wasn’t entirely sure why yet.
The job should have been simple enough. Every morning my boss would email a list of names and corresponding birthdays that I would take to the courthouse and recite to a county clerk, who would either mumble was ‘clear’ or provide case record information. But it quickly became apparent that this job’s vulnerabilities were about context, not content. This was not, in fact, the restaurant and retail jobs that had otherwise occupied my youth’s labor: this was the gig economy. And for most, the gig economy is a brutal, grossly underpaying sphere of work, highly susceptible to myriad abuses. And my peers were no exception.
This architecture of precarity might not have been immediately obvious leaving the crisp, morning air in the outdoor courtyard, walking in through the metal detectors and past the bloated wand-waving court security officers. But a quick shuffle across those epoxy floors and a sharp turn right, and you were in an entirely different climate. Suddenly, you were in a competition. And often you were in competition against people’s daily bread, as they pushed past each other to be first to grab a (sometimes more than one) service number. It was a game of hurry up and wait. But most importantly, hurry.
It’s worth mentioning, that in the highest truth, I was the lucky minority. And I was reminded of that, as I was consistently overwhelmed at just how high the stakes could be at a part-time, per diem, temp job as it varied from employer to employer. And day to day. And clerk to clerk. The stereotypes of most temp-type workers aren’t necessarily untrue. Gig work is mainly populated with the ‘working undeserving’, scavenging craigslist ads and applying to app-based contracting jobs. Caught somewhere between unemployment and being unemployable; all too often caught in some cycle of immigration, economic flux, solo-parenthood or tarnished records. Generally any combination of the above. Though, in my experience, it never denoted a lack of work ethic. It was often to the contrary.
I, unlike other runners, had a personal connection to my employer, who paid humane wages against my daily reports. Others, as I began to learn, were far less fortunate. Depending on the research company they worked for, a court runner could make less than a dollar a name. With only 5 names per turn, and sometimes over 90–120 minutes between turns, it very nearly justified, or at least gave compassionate perception to, threats of violence resource guarding numbers.
Losing your sanity as measured and mocked by the minute hand of the most boring clock known to man, you couldn’t help but get curious about your fellow researchers. After several assignments, I discovered that what was in that narrow hallway was a wealth of stories, full of a whole cast of characters. Both new and familiar. More regularly, new. But there were a few, women in particular, that I came to know more intimately as the work poured in and the hours dragged on.
In the early mornings after crowding to pull my number, you would likely find me trying to make small talk with fellow researcher, Rachel*. With whom I became strongly acquainted with in a desperate act of solidarity to minimize eye contact with Stabby Jane. Swollen belly and all, Rachel endured this industry. And many other gigs, to earn enough money to regain custody of her daughter, all while being a surrogate for a Chinese couple abroad. Having been in a long fight with the state over her daughter’s affairs, she picked up money where she could, as often as she could. Cyclically stuck renting her womb to bear a child for strangers in a foreign land, all in an effort to regain her own daughter, from her own country. Fighting a system that simultaneously demanded from and failed to protect her.
Rachel was kind, scrappy. We bonded even more giving each other the scoop on which clerks at each window were in what moods, to formulate plans to try to squeeze extra names out of each turn. Rendered vulnerable, she was particularly motivated to milk what she could. She was precisely what companies like those that employed her were looking for. Though that never translated to fair wages, or any job security to speak of. A few extra names run by a sympathetic clerk meant she might do more than break even and might be first to be contacted for work the following day. And she was good at it, for a while.
The success contingency fell more obviously on the clerks themselves. The quicker they called ticket numbers, the more turns people got per day, and if they were willing to run more names per turn, this all equated to more income. But friction between clerks and researchers had been a long time brewing. And in the later days of my work, I started to notice a significant antagonism festering between the two.
Every day as more and more researchers flooded the hallways, there was a distinct shift towards more desperation, cheating, and pressure on the court staff. The new researchers I spoke to were making a fraction of the compensation than that of their predecessors. All the while, these companies demanded more outputs under the threat of no future work. Contracting jobs are predatory that way. And thus the presence of supervisors looming over clerks became more frequent, to ensure the 5 name maximum was being enforced. Small talk was no longer allowed. Wait times between numbers multiplied. The doors to the office became closed between turns. And flustered personnel grew responsively all the more strict and impatient, as researchers spiraled into more fanatic measures.
A duality emerged: clerk’s incentives began to look like they would directly interfere with researcher’s ability to make enough money to eat. And researcher’s income was incentivized in such a way that over-burdened the office staff and risked their performance assessment. Which, unknown to me at the time, was the method by which they were shrinking the staff into forced retirements. What should have been allyship forged between at-risk proletariats, festered into entirely the opposite. As the hallways became claustrophobically full of rotating researchers and clerk desks became increasingly empty, the war for livelihoods emerged. Clerks began to turn on researchers. Researchers on clerks. And then each within their own respective groups, turned on one another. It was a frenzy.
Long before the public records office fell into the disarray that I witnessed, I was told about an entirely different way of life and even the culture of collaboration that existed there. Rumor has it that the public research industry was once lucrative and balanced. Clerks, as public sector workers, were not falling prey to budget cuts and scrutiny. When adequate income and job security was prevalent for both parties, the harmony between the two was natural. Clerks and researchers had relationships that often resulted in lunch dates, sometimes even gestures of celebration in the form of small gifts on special occasions. They encouraged personal investments and professional friendships.
This was interrupted by two pivotal points of inflection: 9/11 and right-wing policies that began devouring public budgets. As 9/11 bore a national paranoia that became an American way of life, background checks became the pulse of all major economies. A previously niche market became flooded and wages were driven down—way down. The Neo-conservatives did not hesitate to abuse sentiments about the war-on-terror to divert all funding towards defense and justify the shrinking of all other government ‘parasites.’ As both groups fell through the cracks and the market failed to respond proportionately to this new world of surveillance, the industry became the zoo that I witnessed.
Jane, similar to Rachel, was a single mother liable to custody loss of her youngest son. One child seized already by the system after a losing battle with addiction, she was prone to share her grief of the loss of one child and the stress of danger of losing her other, with anyone who would listen in an effort to finance favors. I overheard, “They took my baby. She was my baby. God gave her to me”, through tears more than half a dozen times over the course of several weeks.
This transition in the public records office to swelling with competition and a dramatic reduction of resources spoke to her deepest anxieties about inadequate income and the inevitable defeat that would ensue. Though it is unknown how soon in she started cheating the number cue, her paranoia long proceeded the evidence. As she paced the hallway asking people for numbers and making endless phone calls to her employer, you could often overhear her trying to find sleeping arraignments for her small family after losing her housing.
This behavior annoyed a seasoned veteran researcher, Sarah*, as she had specific feelings on fairness and background check etiquette. Sarah had a wonderfully sunny disposition, though her mental impairments made her virtually unemployable in the normal market. Most mornings I worked, if she wasn’t first in line, she was there shortly after me with her two living daughters in tow. She was warm and simple. She enjoyed routine, which made the influx of researchers all the more upsetting for her. She couldn’t keep up with new antics of increasingly desperate maneuvers. Unfortunately, as the weeks went on, that meant the jobs offered to her hung more and more in the balance. As the previous decorums of name running dissipated, her employer grew more upset with the lessening number of reports.
I was often asked to watch her daughters on her turns, as they had severe autism too and made running names too difficult and confusing for her. Childcare in the court was only provided to children in custody disputes, not to people working for or at the courts, and her employer couldn’t have cared less about Sarah’s personal matters. I was told in secret that sometimes the daycare provider in the adjoining wing helped watch her children on slower days.
Sarah came into this line of work years prior and had been privy to economic desolation the entirety of her life. Having never dabbled with drugs, or any other compromising life choices, she was an adult with disabilities that left her vulnerable to taking jobs like this. Gig work, beyond paying less than minimum wage with no job security, also abused the metrics of contract work. This meant no benefits, including insurance. During her time in this economy, her third daughter died from an entirely treatable heart condition, and many of her own medical conditions worsened.
Social theorists Daniel HoSang and Joseph Lowndes study at great length the reach of the rhetoric around producerism and parasitism in American politics. As policies work to frame public sector workers and precarious gig workers both as necessary casualties of neoliberalism, this makes the most necessary gatekeepers to modern society also concurrently the most underpaid and heavily scrutinized professional people. But it isn’t enough to reduce this issue as limited to an exasperated venture for a more free market. As I personally watched mostly women and their children making the ultimate autonomous sacrifices, this become an essential element to this economic formation, bleeding into the sphere of necropolitics.
While one element seeks political and rhetorical efforts to legitimate deregulation gutting government employee budgets, those same political-economies justify necrocapitalism. Allowing the established governances both the authority to dictate and reproduce the conditions that effectively maneuver class malignancy over the most precarious of populations. Which is to say, more plainly, that the conservative resentments towards the parasitic-working-undeserving mandate a relationship of dependency that creates class warfare maintained below, all while exploiting these population’s labors to the barest of existences. Often to a fatal, finite point.
Mark LeVine, Professor of History at the University of California Irvine, offers us Necroliberalism to frame this assault more acutely. This sanction of necropolitics, he claims is, “justified by neoliberal market orthodoxies, the ‘war on terror’, and increasingly direct appeals to racially, ethnically, culturally and religiously ‘pure’ identities.” None of which qualifies criminal offenders, drug addicts, and the disabled as immune to economic and ableist otherness. As these exclusions move to bolster quasi economic Darwinism, biopolitical leveraging will invariably replicate itself and we can—should—expect class antagonisms to grow more all the more encompassing.
Public record researchers will phase out, as the archives move online. There is sufficient evidence that this is already happening. Employers are already jumping ship on their businesses and investing towards their next enterprises in separate markets. As this automation occurs, court runners like Jane, Rachel and Sarah, are likely to be defenseless in maintaining their own income, children, and basic needs from this specific industry. What will be waiting for them is more gig employers like Uber (if they are lucky enough to have or keep a car), delivery services, markets for both the body and biological materials (as Rachel already has), or illegal enterprises. It is implausible that the women I knew will ever ascend this cycle, and it will have generational repercussions as their children fall into disparities vicariously and consequently. Clerks will also begin to lose their jobs as automation and politicians will depict them as irrelevant, dependent, tax-payer liabilities.
As COVID-19 has wreaked havoc and destroyed thousands of jobs, it is currently unknown what the scale of competition and despair will look like as these industries dissolve in conjunction with a national economic crisis. It is reasonable to assume that as the typical gig worker’s market value is inhibited by the new influx of vying wage earners, they will be left behind. By being left behind, these people—women and their children especially—will become assailable to unthinkable violence, theft, and trauma that we will have to reckon with for years to come.
