Gigged: the future?

On 23rd March 2020, UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced a national lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. People are urged to work from home, most of them packed up their desks and relocated their workstations into their homes - the bedroom became their office, and the kitchen became their meeting room. However not everyone can work like this, a group of people called essential workers are still allowed to travel for work. For example, the people working in the supermarket to ensure we have enough food in our fridge, in the post office that delivering the good we ordered online and in the hospital to cure us when we got ill. Among them, there are people who drive their own car or ride their own scooter to accomplish the jobs they found on their phone - either through the app they registered or the online website. We called them gig economy workers.

After Boris's announcement, I was trying to buy an office chair on Facebook Marketplace - I know I have to spend all my time in front of the computer for the rest of the academic year. When I found an appropriate one from a girl who lived around London Bridge, I ordered an Uber to move it to my home. I opened the app on my phone, put the destination in, sent the request, and almost instantly, someone took my order. It was a 30 mins journey. On the way home the driver complained to me about the decision that Boris Johnson had made. “lockdown made my life much harder. I have to work and I have children to feed. Right now not many people come out, the money I can earn became much less.”

Ten years ago, when Uber launched at SXSW 2011, took a job from mobile phone beyond what most people can imagine. Uber made two apps: one for drivers, and one for customers. When a customer requested a ride, the app would send a notification for nearby drivers, who can decide to take the job or not. The Uber company took permission fee from each task. They do not need to provide any hardware - the drivers use their own car to finish the job. In fact, Uber did not have employees either - they called the driver as an independent contractor. Unlike companies that have to pay the employee for their coffee breaks and must trade them according to anti-discrimination laws, there is no requirement for companies to provide training, equipment or benefits for independent contractors. The consequence is the gig economy worker has no sick pay, holidays, minimal wages or any insurance.

Despite independent contractors lack of stability and benefit, the number of people taking this type of job increased significantly. In the US, the number of people who earned money through platforms like Uber, Airbnb grew 47-fold between 2012 and 2015. By 2016, 20-30% working population in the US and EU worked as a freelance. For companies, shifting work to independent contractors was the way to reduce cost and liability; For workers - especially those millennials who do not agree with obtaining a job is the path to dignity, security and independence like their parent, freelancing seems to give them flexibility and freedom.

One reason more people taking the freelance job is many people do not like 9-5 jobs. An annual Gallup palls between 2011 and 2015 indicated that in the US, 70% of workers said they are not engaged in their working. "People do not want to be employed" because "they like the ability to choose - the number of rounds they do, the number of hours they work." "People are increasingly building flexible career on their own terms, based on their passions, desired lifestyle and access to a much broader pool of opportunities than ever before in history.” "For the first time, I think in possibly history, work is flexible to life and not the other way around."

However, the flexibility promised by those gig economy companies it is not true for everyone. For those having scarce skills, such as graphic designers, programmers, journalists, life is undeniably easier after becoming a freelancer: no more office politics, no need to wait for the long chains of command from their boss, no need pretending to work when not having enough work, more free time and the earnings is same or even more than having a full-time job. But for those low-skilled workers, they have been damaged more than helped by this trend. Contracted cleaners and security guards earned 15% and 17% less respectively compared to their in-house peers. A report published by the US Government and Accountability office in 2015 found in general, the temp workers and freelancers earned about 10.6% less than "standard workers". So why are more people taking the freelance job even when they earn less?

The reason is for some people, finding a steady 9 to 5 job no longer an option. In other words, they do not really have a choice - taking an underpaid freelance job or not having a job. For those people, the gig economy provides alternative way to earn money. In the US, After Uber launched their service, the unemployment rate had fallen from 10% in 2009 to 6.6% in 2014. A Forbes cover story in 2013 explained that the sharing economy and gig economy had created "an economic revolution that is quietly turning millions of people into part-time entrepreneurs.” The future of work, which seems to become much easy to imagine than before, will be a point that no matter how complicated the task is, it could be ordered with the click of an app.

However, by the year Uber launched, almost all the taxi drivers and 13% population in the US were already self-employed or working as independent contractors. Around 45% of accountants, 50% of IT workers, and 70% of truck drivers were working for contractors rather than employees. Therefore, Uber did not invent a new way of working, but pushed this trend forward with new smartphone technology. We should not simply complain about those companies that provide the platform for the social issues amplified by the gig economy. But how do we end up like this?

In 1930, after the great depression, John Maynard Keynes predicted by the early twenty-first century, technology would have advanced sufficiently that could make us achieved a 15-hour workweek. Although in theory, productivity and capital growth already met the thresholds for this vision, we all know it did not happen today. In history, John Maynard Keynes is not the only one who optimistically dreamed about the new technology that would make a better future. Adam Smith sang the praises of the "very pretty machines" that he believed would in time "facilitate and abridge labour”. Oscar Wilde who a century later fantasised about a future "in which machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work." But in reality, despite we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, many tasks in factories, businesses and homes already be replaced by automated cyber-physical systems, people work more.

However, a 15-hour workweek is not a dream for our hunter-gather ancestors. In 1963, Richard Borshay Lee headed to the Kalahari desert in north-east Botswana, spending time with one of the last of hunting and gathering societies, the northern Ju/'hoansi, or as he referred as '!Kung Bushmen'. He discovered Ju/'hoansi managed to meet all their basic needs on the basis of 15 to 17 hours effort of hunter and gather each week and spent smiler amount of time on other chores like papering food, picking firewoods, erecting shelters and making or fixing tools. This was less than half of the time that employed Americans spent on work, getting to work and on chores. The rest of the time what they do is leisure activities such as relaxing, making music, dancing, socialising or telling stories.

This lifestyle is a clue of how our ancestors lived in 95% of our species' history: People were remarkably relaxed on food quest, usually easily met their nutritional requirements and spent most of their time on leisure. It is very different compared to the stereotypical image of how hunter-gather lives. Usually, people think they endured a constant battle against starvation and survival. The reason hunter-gathers had so much free time was mainly because they only focused on meeting their immediate material needs - they did not care about accruing surpluses in everyday life at all. James Woodburn described it as an "immediate return economy". He compared it with "delayed return economies" of farming and industrial societies, in which the labour effort is almost always focused on meeting future rewards. This transition from hunter-gather to agriculture fundamentally changed how people engaged with the world around them and the understanding of time.

Unlike the foragers who focused almost all of their attention on the present or immediate future, tasks involved in farming is about achieving a future goal or managing a future risk based on past experience. The works they did in present, such as cleaning the land, preparing soils, digging ditches, sowing seeds, removing weeds, naturing crops, is for next year when seasons changed they can harvest enough food to support them go through next seasonal cycle and seeds to plant in the following year. Farmers have to use their labour to transform barren land into productive filed and spend time taking care of it. Fields that were left untended were soon reclaimed by weeds; Structures that were not maintained soon fell apart, and animals that were left unsupervised either ran away or were caught by predators. They had to do more work on food quests than hunter-gathers.

Another difference is, as the future is unpredictable, the challenge farmers faced was much bigger than hunter-gathers. It is true that hunter-gathers sometimes had bad luck on food hunting, but the suffering they had was only short-term - they can easily go to another field for hunting the next day as they tended to live within the limits imposed by environments and only required a small amount of energy. Those farmers, however, faced threats beyond their control such as droughts, floods and disease among crops which had a huge impact on food output. Unlike hunter-gathers can eat hundreds of different species found in the environment, they only relied on one or two high yield crops and it required them to skate perpetually on the edge of the natural limits to maximise the productivity of the land. The consequence of the delayed return process is when harvests fail, farmers are more likely to suffer severe, existentially threatening famines than foragers. As a result, they started to focus on accumulating resources.

Although in theory, the increase in productivity led by hard-working, adopting new technologies or acquiring new land in farming societies means more food supply and it should make farmer's life easier, it is only true for making one or two lucky generations thrive. Thomas Robert Malthus observed that agricultural output only grew 'arithmetically', whereas population, which he calculated tended to double naturally every twenty-five years. He believed as the result of this imbalance growing when food supply increased due to improvement on productivity, farmers inevitably had more mouths to feed, with the result that any per capita surplus was soon lost, everything back to a more miserly baseline. Today we called this phenomenon as a 'Malthusian trap'.

Malthus also pointed out why the population in agricultural societies keep increasing. Apart from the raw uncontrolled lust, farmers were all aware that the harder they work means they might eat well in the following year. They could do a lot of things in order to reduce the near-existential risks, but all of these involved work. When they had limited labour to spare, an obvious solution to this problem was to procreate. However, for each new labourer they gave birth to not only means they have an additional mouth to feed but also after a point resulted in a noticeable decline in food yields per person. They put themselves into a 'Malthusian trap'. As agricultural societies continued to expand, prosperity was usually only ever fleeting, and scarcity evolved from an occasional inconvenience that foragers stoically endured every once in a while to a near perennial problem. The only solution to it was working harder and expanding into new territory.

Therefore, it is not surprising that human beings deeply embedded the concept of scarcity in farming societies as it was often a matter of life and death, and it still underwrites how we organise our economic life today. The reason we had the assumption on hunter-gathers suffering on food supply is because of our concept of 'problem of scarcity' - We believed resources are limited and what we worried about all the time is how to extract the living from it like those farmers. This is also been referred to as 'economic problem' by economists, the idea that we have infinite wants but that all resources are limited sits at the beating heart of the definition of economics as the study of how people allocate scarce resources to meet their needs and desires. Economists believed that scarcity is what drives us to work, and only by working we can begin to bridge the gap between our infinite desires and our limited means.

However, our hunter-gathers ancestors believed the environment generously sharing food with them unconditionally, and as a result, they did not feel the need to work hard. In fact, they evenly distributed all the resources among them. They did not have chiefs, leaders or institutional authority figures inside society - no one was able to lord it over anyone else. Nicolas Peterson, an anthropologist described their redistributive practices as 'demand sharing', a term to describe all societies where food and objects are shared on the basis of requests by the receiver rather than offers made by the giver. By ensuring everyone has the right to tax others, the material wealth is always spread evenly. No matter how productive they were, they can always have something to eat. Therefore, there is no reason for people wasting their energy to accumulate more material wealth than anyone else, and they did not view hard work as a virtue. In other words, they saw their relationship with each other as an extension of the relationship they had with the environments, as environments shared unconditionally with them and they shared with others in return.

Farmers, in contrast, saw themselves exchanging theirs labour with the environment for the promise of future food, they believed the work they did for making land productive as the land owed them a harvest. When they extended this labour/debt relationship with their land to each other, the result was they only sharing with their household or a core group of kin. Sharing was framed as exchanging, and there was no such thing as a free lunch in their societies - Everyone had to work, and those who worked hard had the highest likelihood of survival. This working culture and the culture for accumulating resources became an unquestioned principle in modern culture.

If we look at what jobs existed in the 1930s, we can make Keynes' dream come true if we had kept up the same type of job profile. Back the time there are a lot of people working in industry, agriculture and domestic servants and now that is all gone. People had been ejected from the production lines because of the new machines. Instead of having more leisure time after being replaced, they had been pushed into the service sector. According to the UK Office of National Statistics, 83% of working people in the UK are now employed in the service sector. In 2013, David Graeber wrote a short essay to differentiate between the jobs that were genuinely useful like teaching, medicine, farming and scientific research, and the apparent efflorescence of other jobs that served no obvious purpose other than giving someone something to do such as corporate lawyers, public relations executives, health and academic administrators and financial service providers. He referred to them as “bullshit jobs” and defined them as “the employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”. Many jobs we created in the service sector simply because we feel that humans cannot live without organised work.

When we think about the future of work, especially to rethink the life of those who lack of resources and forced to push out the job market, we have to break out of the notion that was shaped around scarcity which was forged when we were farmers living in the land that we had to work in order to survive. Uber and other gig companies showed the option under the notion of scarcity, but our hunter-gather ancestors gave us a clue when a society no longer have the ‘economic problem’ might look like. Working harder is not a solution for the ‘economic problem’ today, we have to redesign the system when more people taking freelance job as 9 to 5 job no longer an option to redistribute resources in order to find the path to our economic utopia.