Posted on 01/12/2016 11:19:49 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The obvious candidates for word of the year are the labels of the year's big stories -- new words like "microaggression" or resurgent ones like "refugees." But sometimes a big theme is captured in more subtle ways. So for my word of the year, I offer you the revival of "gig" as the name for a new economic order. It's the last chapter in the life of a little word that has tracked the rise and fall of the great American job.
"Gig" goes back more than a century as musicians' slang for a date or engagement. Nobody's sure where it originally came from, though there are lots of imaginative theories out there. But the word didn't have any particular glamour until the 1950s, when the hipsters and the Beats adapted it to mean any job you took to keep body and soul together while your real life was elsewhere.
The earliest example of that usage of the word that I've found is from a 1952 piece by Jack Kerouac, talking about his gig as a part-time brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad in San Jose. For the hipsters, calling a job a gig was a way of saying it didn't define you. A gig was a commitment you felt free to walk away from as soon as you had $50 in your pocket.
That was the era when the "real job" -- permanent, well-paid and with benefits -- was enjoying its moment in the American sun, thanks to the New Deal programs, strong unions and the postwar boom. So to turn away from that security and comfort in search of something more meaningful seemed a daring and romantic gesture. When you read Kerouac now, it still does.
"Gig" was a natural for the hippies who succeeded the hipsters, who made the avoidance of regular work a condition of tribal membership. But the word's more subversive overtones receded along with the counterculture. In recent decades, "gig" has become just a hip term for any temporary job or stint, with the implication you're not particularly invested in it. I think of the barista or bookstore clerk who responds to my questions with a look that says, "Hey, man, it's a gig. I don't really DO this?"
That tone of insouciance has made "the gig economy" the predominant name for what's being touted as the industrial revolution of our times. The lifetime job is history, we're told, a victim of technology and the logic of the market. Instead, careers will be a patchwork of temporary projects and assignments, with the help of apps and platforms with perky names like FancyHands, Upwork and TaskRabbit.
It has been called the on-demand economy, the 1099 economy, the peer-to-peer economy, and freelance nation, among other things. But over the past year, investors, the business media and politicians seem to have settled on "the gig economy." It strikes just the right jaunty, carefree note. The Financial Times explains that in the future, work will be less secure but lots more exciting. We can make our own schedule and hours, pick the projects that interest us, work from anywhere and try our hands at different trades.
The buzzwords fly thick and fast here — we'll be "solopreneurs" and "free range humans" with "portfolio careers." As the head of a freelancers' organization puts it, we're no longer just lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we're part-time lawyers-cum-amateur photographers who write on the side.
That's the image that phrases like "the gig economy" and "freelance nation" bring to mind, an economy populated by professionals and creatives, typically single millennials — people who may be willing to trade some security for the opportunity to take a month or two off to visit Patagonia. But that language doesn't get at most of the people who are cut loose in the new economy and who aren't reveling in the independence it gives them — the ill-paid temps and contingent workers that some have called the "precariat."
Unless you're a bass player, calling a job a gig is a luxury reserved for people who can pretend they don't need one.
When you hear "freelancer" you don't think of the people cobbling together a livelihood cleaning apartments, delivering groceries and doing other people's laundry. And not many of those people think of themselves as having gigs. Unless you're a bass player, calling a job a gig is a luxury reserved for people who can pretend they don't need one.
There's a kind of semantic shell game here, as the promoters of the new economy trade on the whisper of romance that still clings to "gig." For the hipsters and the Beats, the word evoked a fantasy of freedom and escape from the soul-deadening routine of a permanent job.
If you have a long cultural memory, it's a bit jarring to hear those paeans to gig life coming from the venture capitalists and consultants who are hyping the new economic order. It's as if the shade of Kerouac were still haunting the place that's now called Silicon Valley, where he had his gig as a brakeman 65 years ago.
But their logic sounds impeccable. If "gig" suggests the independence you get when you're not tied down to a steady lifetime job, then just think of the freedom we'll all enjoy when the traditional job is consigned to the scrap heap of history, and the economy is just gigs all the way down. But the idea of a gig is only alluring if you know you can hit the road when it gets joyless. Otherwise it's just an old word for a job you need that you can't count on having tomorrow.
Career --> Job --> Gig
Every paid job I’ve ever had has been a ‘gig’. I don’t see what’s wrong with non-traditional work being available for people who want it. Some of us prefer it.
Back to the Future, it's the way the world worked for Centuries.
That was the era when the “real job” — permanent, well-paid and with benefits — was enjoying its moment in the American sun, thanks to the New Deal programs, strong unions and the postwar boom. So to turn away from that security and comfort in search of something more meaningful seemed a daring and romantic gesture. When you read Kerouac now, it still does.
Gosh, this guy really drank the Commie Kool Aid.
Yep. All those bennies along with gov’t mandates got too expensive - not only for business, but for gov’t itself. The Public Employment Retirement Systems are all changing from guaranteed retirement pay to something approaching a 401k. At least that’s what happened here in OR.
So now we live with a new reality
Yep. This is the wave of the future. Some of us do it now, from low-paying MTurk tasks to higher-paying-but-temporary “per diem” jobs. If none of those are available, then search the trash heaps for scrap metal to sell. Welcome to the New America.
I wouldn’t mind living in a really nice RV traveling from gig to gig so to speak. But try to live without a permanent address, government doesn’t like that very much. They have a hard time taxing moving targets.
All that has changed because rising wages and falling unemployment is now consider a crises by the Establishment and its only solution it to flood the US labor market with culturally incompatible wage slaves from really awful places, most of them hate America.
"Watch the police and the taxman miss me, I'm Mobile!"
It should of course be an option for those who want to be self-employed and have the independence to not have to be tied to one job for decades.
The problem comes when most people have to live in that lifestyle. There can't be stability in society if a majority of people don't have roots somewhere. What happens to the kids when we become a nation of gypsies? They need stability in their formative years. What happens when most senior citizens never had the chance throughout their lives to prepare for retirement?
Know a quality consultant who does exactly that when he takes a ‘gig’. His wife stays home in Missouri but sometimes ‘comes to visit’ for a bit if the location is especially nice.
Most of his work runs 1-3 months so he said it’s perfect for him.
Would it be even only theoretically possible for a person without any particular qualifications or experience - i.e., without a pocket full of training certificates, etc. - to just "walk in" from the street and get a gig as a part-time brakeman for the Southern Pacific in California today?
Anyone have an idea?
Regards,
Of Course your wonderful life is based in those traditional values.
Man, Woman, Lots of Kids, Stay and home Mom etc etc.
I became a contract laborer, working in construction/remodeling for myself in 2003 because I was fed up with being a workers comp case manager-I have no regrets, even though the obamaeconomy has made it necessary to squeeze every dime and live in a dump right now-that is just the way it is, but it will get better.
But out here, many of those working for themselves are not doing it by choice-it is because jobs they used to commute back and forth to at companies in the city are long gone. We are becoming a semi-isolated rural economy, working mostly for our neighbors-and increasingly, we take pay in barter/trade if cash is short-and that may prove to be a good thing in the future...
There will be severe blowback to this development.
Trump is but one manifestation of it.
All fine and good until the millennial gigsters want to retire. Then not only will they want their college debts paid for they’ll also want their retirement (having no social security or pension or 401k) paid for.
-PJ
Am I the only one who, having read only the headline, thought the article was about Steve Jobs and gigabytes?
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