New Orleans      Reality is a hard pill to swallow, but millions around the world are trying to choke down the fact that the fictional attraction for much of gig work as extra income at flexible hours and a temporary thing is now, gulp, their more than fulltime, precarious career job.

Surveys among the members of ACORN’s affiliated gig workers union in India, the first to be successfully registered, indicate that for the vast majority, their work as food delivery workers is their fulltime job, not a gig.  Voters in Massachusetts approved the right to organize a union under the state’s labor department, and now a joint effort by the Service Employees and the Machinists have signed up a threshold percentage to initiate collective bargaining to cover 70,000 such gig workers in the state.  I don’t know if there’s a line of other states ready to follow, but the recognition and enthusiasm of workers there pop another bubble to the myth of such work being occasional and temporary.

And then there’s China, where there are an estimated 20 million such workers in delivery of food, medicine, clothes, and other packages.  As millions have made this their fulltime job in the post-Covid Chinese economic strain, competition for orders have led to wages that have fallen almost in half from the equivalence of one-dollar to only a bit more than fifty cents a delivery.  Many workers are reportedly working 12 to 14 hours per day with little time off in order to make the nut on housing and food.

As the Economist reports, the role of the government is controversial,

…as a regulator and enabler of persistent problems.  Many concerns focus not on drivers’ wages but on their working conditions.  Algorithms dictate order flows, pushing them to work faster.  Delivery platforms almost always side with consumers in disputes.  And drivers are typically contractors for third-party staffing firms, which allows big e-commerce platforms to avoid payments for medical insurance and pensions.  Surveys of drivers indicate that roughly a third have been hurt on the job and only a fifth have insurance for workplace injuries.  On paper, rules to protect delivery drivers, introduced by the government in 2021…[include] guaranteed minimum wages and required platforms to make order-dispatching algorithms more humane…[but] in practice, officials have generally failed to implement these standards and punish violations.

This is all a problem in plain sight for anyone anywhere willing to open their eyes.  And, if you missed it, there are now a flood of movies, documentaries, books, and more that are detailing the misery of gig economy workers and this explosive growth of yet another underclass fueling fragile economies.

Unions might make a difference.  Certainly, in India, we have some victories under our belts around working conditions, especially the impact of heat, and some policies around benefits and social security, but we’re at the tip of the iceberg.  Even our strike of 10,000 in Bihar didn’t win recognition and has us still struggling to get the leaders back to work who have been blackballed by the food delivery apps.  In China, delivery workers can join a union, but these are not independent organizations, so collective bargaining isn’t the silver bullet to fix the situation there.

When a gig is now a permanent job, despite companies claiming differently, labor laws need to drop the fiction and provide real protection and enforcement in this sector.  This seems obvious, but governments everywhere seem slow to recognize the reality.  Workers may not always be so restrained in their ability to protest, and when they explode, no one should be surprised.