The Gig Economy: Potential promise and pitfalls
Linguist Geoff Nunberg announced his word of the year on NPR’s Fresh Air, and he nailed it: Nunberg’s choice is “gig.”
For over a century, gig was “slang for a date or engagement.” In the 1950s, hipsters and the Beats used the term for “any job you took to keep body and soul together while your real life was elsewhere.” Nunberg explains, “A gig was a commitment you felt free to walk away from as soon as you had $50 in your pocket.”
Nunberg explains that it was easy to embrace such a gig when a person had access to a “‘real job’” that was “permanent, well-paid and with benefits.” Thanks to the New Deal, strong unions and the postwar boom, he recalls, the 1950s and 1960s were America’s moment.
The gig economy
Now that we live in a “gig economy,” some millennials refer to their jobs as gigs. Other names cited for our economy include “on-demand economy … peer-to-peer economy, and “freelance nation,” as mentioned in the radio show. People who were once known as “employees” are now called “‘solopreneurs’ and ‘free range humans’ with ‘portfolio careers.’” According to Nunberg, there are workers such as “the ill-paid temps and contingent workers that some have called the ‘precariat.’”
The linguist then adds that “calling a job a gig is a luxury reserved for people who can pretend they don’t need [a job].” Most young workers still need careers, but gigs are often the best they can get. Working people must cobble “a livelihood cleaning apartments, delivering groceries and doing other people’s laundry.”
We’ve been here before
On one hand, the economic prospects of millennials are depressing. Wages for males have fallen since 1969, and the wages of women have been almost as stagnant. Truly frightening is how projections for lifetime earnings have been dropping for every generation since 1952, and it’s especially worrisome for today’s low-income children.Poor children in Oklahoma County face economic prospects that are three points lower The Gig Economy: Potential promise and pitfalls - NonDoc:
