The number of universities cutting jobs and slashing courses has long passed 50, with many more tightening belts to gastric-band levels. This week alone has seen the creation of the UK’s first “Super-University”: which, in its blending of cash-strapped Kent with Greenwich, is surely more marketing than Marvel. And worse will probably follow. As the Office for Students found, 42.7% of English institutions are forecast to end 2025-6 in deficit, while the once-reliable cash-cow of overseas students has soured too. Non-UK entrants fell by 7.7% in 2024-5, some 9% below what universities themselves had forecast.

As an hourly lecturer working at an English university, these struggles are deeply personal. Never heard of us? No, of course not — we “Hourlies” are the best-kept secret in the gig economy. Our precarious positions are scarcely mentioned in glossy prospectuses, and we tend not to be invited to take the stage come graduation day, for fear new graduates might cringe at the sight of our tattered, custard-stained gowns. Or, perhaps, it’s because vice chancellors are scared we’ll scream out the grim truth: that we earn less than the average Deliveroo driver, yet are regularly relied upon for over a quarter of all higher-education teaching.

What happened? I’m frequently asked that by ashen-faced boomers, whose comprehension of all things university seems to have stopped at caps, gowns, brandy in wingbacks, and seminars thick with cig smoke.

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Is it, perhaps, that these once-great halls of knowledge have, in recent years, been reduced to mere political beach balls, palmed back and forth by warring sides — one saying that everybody should sack off academia and become a plumber instead, the other that every child who shows an aptitude for plumbing should study it to degree level?

Or is it simply that the veil has finally dropped: that Britain’s universities have been flogging impossible debts to unwitting young people, all while degrading the working conditions of their lowest-paid workers? Well, it’s not for this anonymous writer to judge. Of course, I already have. I just cannot say so publicly, for fear, to misquote Scrooge, of “losing my situation”. Either way, take my cowardice as some evidence of the malign power structures now dominating these degraded institutions.

And degraded they are. A Deliveroo driver can make around £29,120 a year. Factor in our own student debts, and training costs to lecture in the first place, and that doesn’t stack up well against my own meager £21,000, especially when you consider that so-called “substantive” lecturers — a weird, widely used term somehow implying we’re in-substantial — earn considerably more, for doing, in my place at least, close to the exact same job. Yes, the driver’s figure is full-time and mine is not: but that is rather the point. Our hours are capped, our summers unpaid, and part-time is not quite part-time if the University is shut half the year. We can’t earn more even if we wanted to, making the unregulated subterranea of a Deliveroo driver seem, at least through our current lens of desperation, somewhat appealing.

Yet if there are perhaps 90,000 of us Hourlies — representing some 36% of all part-time academic staff — no one can say quite how much teaching we actually do deliver: tacitly suggesting that someone would rather it went uncounted. Back in 2018, when the UCU asked institutions to disclose the proportion of teaching hours delivered by hourly-paid staff, almost 100 failed to answer: 36 ignored the request outright, while 60 said that they either did not hold the information, or that digging it out would take too long.

Almost a decade on — and a decade that has, incidentally, run parallel to the rise of the gig economy — we Hourlies have only been leaned upon harder, often way above our job descriptions. I myself am designing curriculums; consulting on course structures; and dealing with pastoral care — all on top of teaching. Now, I’m sure senior management jobs are difficult too. But it’s worth noting here that a vice chancellor earns roughly 12 times what I do, and around six times what a “substantive” lecturer does. It surely begs the question: is it that their talent is so preternatural, so once-in-an-eon, that such a pay-gap is justified in times of fiscal ruin? Or that the ship is sinking and they’re going for the gold? Despite heavy deficits, meanwhile, and with students forever complaining about a lack of contact hours, my institution lately introduced yet another tier of bureaucratic middle management, only adding to its teetering, top-heavy structure.

The general cultural disregard for gig workers rubs off on us too. Some months back, a senior program manager, a professor, greeted me by saying: “Got yourself a full-time job yet?” Though meant half-jokingly, it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf when you consider the pay and power disparity between us, let alone the fact that the road to promotion, with or without a PhD, no longer really exists. The fumes we were living off — fumes of a once-respected profession — have now totally evaporated.

All this is heightened by the job’s seasonality. Unlike the Deliveroo driver’s incessant pedaling come rain or shine, we Hourlies are hemmed into short, money-making windows before lengthy stretches of unpaid “vacation” or ever-extended study leave, which even students are starting to see as a waste of their heady loans. In practice, the consequences here can be absurd. One close colleague — a fine tutor with a PhD — is regularly maxing out credit cards just to pay the rent. Come the long, dry summers, they take shifts in a coffee shop to make ends meet.

Bottlenecked periods of potential teaching hours turns the whole thing into a feeding frenzy come term time. It’s a stark contrast with our Deliveroo comrades, whose working culture is fairly linear: order comes in on the app; restaurant prepares and dispatches; driver delivers. In the working culture of the hourly lecturer, however, this process is far more convoluted, leaving ample scope for machinations.

Almost all of my hours are dictated by individual line managers, whose preferences, timetables, and yes, personal taste — bias, both conscious and unconscious — play a significant part in who gets work and when. For these reasons, cronyism abounds: I know at least two colleagues whose partners or relatives were employed shortly after they were. Naturally, paranoia and conspiracy are rife. At times, my place can feel more like The Sopranos than Stanford.

Superiors must be, on some level, aware that they’ve got us up against a wall. I’ve therefore learned that it’s prudent to forgo any kind of professional critique, dissent or healthy debate for fear of putting noses out of joint. Much of my time, I’ve noticed, is spent stunting my own intellectual instincts to avoid embarrassing some bewildered superior, overworked and as fearful as the rest of us of being ousted come the next cull. It increasingly feels, anyway, that what modern universities really want from their staff is not curiosity or dynamism or enthusiasm —  but to act as wadding for a holey timetable. After this, it’s pretense they’re after, followed by submission, just as I imagine Deliveroo drivers are hardly encouraged to question the culinary skill of the kebab house they’re collecting from. For both driver and lecturer, it’s a case of turn up, pick up, fuck off.

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So, might anything change? Sadly, in my experience, Britain’s universities — left to fester in stale pipe-smoke and hubris for decades now — still seem to be concerned only with status games and paychecks.

On the humiliations go. A while back, a colleague, at the start of the year, opened their laptop to find their hours had been decimated overnight, their financial security annihilated in a single click of the calendar. The word in the staff canteen was that the cut had been timed to land weeks before the beginning of term. Naturally, if they’d been informed any earlier, said colleague may well have had time to source work elsewhere. Yet with two weeks to go, they were once again up against a wall, with nowhere else to turn. Then, just recently, the same exact thing happened to me. Cue a frantic few days spent clawing back hours from gatekeepers, in what’s now become a yearly ritual of self-preservation. And though redundancies of full-time staff are, of course, happening — with some predicting around 10,000 job cuts a year if trends persist — it’s us Hourlies who’ll be the first to go, becoming, as the grim jargon would have it, “financial shock absorbers”.

Are there any alternatives? One solution — which dovetails well with the rise of AI in the education sector  — would be to return to the values of communication, intellectual curiosity, and pastoral presence in higher education: as opposed to seeing higher education as mere content delivery. And don’t take this old crone’s word for it: it’s what I hear from my students daily. What they want are challenging, engaging tutors, not calcified ones who’ve barely left their desk in decades. There’s even a world where a different kind of Hourly could provide just that, not least given most of us juggle regular jobs alongside our teaching commitments. Just please respect our contribution, secure our roles, or else pay us more. After all, even Deliveroo gives you a chance to tip the driver.

If it’s happening to Lorenz, it will be happening to everyone downhill from her, too. Certainly, there are plenty of people who will attest to that. Most of them have noticed an obvious problem with the business model: there are only so many paid subscriptions a reader will spring for. Eventually, Substack was going to hit a demand ceiling.

Back in 2017, Substack solved a particular problem for a particular type of journalist at a particular time. We were a few years into Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the first year of Trump’s first term. The Great Awokening was well underway, and over the next few years, culminating in the summer of 2020, the media industry would come to resemble a grumpy religious sect, with its theological dogma and mechanisms for punishing dissent. It became a suffocating place for anyone who wanted to think the least bit freely.

In Substack, journalists who refused to bend to the new rules had a refuge to escape to. That is the story of how Bari Weiss founded the biggest media outlet on the platform, The Free Press. Substack served that early generation of writers well: they became its poster children and its evangelists.

But while it solved a problem for journalists, it did not solve the problem of journalism: which is that its business model was shattered two decades ago and is yet to be fixed. In the 20th century, journalism was propped up by mass advertising, which, as Andrey Miroshnichenko has pointed out, was effectively a tax on corporations to sustain the jobs of journalists. Companies couldn’t find their customers without getting their brand names in front of them, and the only way to do that was by running advertisements in the newspapers that showed up on everyone’s doorstep each morning and on the TV shows that were piped daily and nightly into their living rooms.

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This was the marketing equivalent of trawling: it caught a lot of fish by casting a net wide enough to scoop up everything in its path. It was inefficient and expensive, and it produced enough revenue to sustain an entire profession of reporters, editors, producers, and news anchors. The peak of profitability for The New York Times was at the cusp of the emergence of the internet — 1999, when it reported net income of $447 million. Last year, conversely, that figure was $334 million.

But along came Facebook, and suddenly, instead of trawling, advertisers could fly fish, but on an industrial scale. Targeted advertising allowed them to individually pick their customers from the teeming mass of humanity on the internet, and for a sliver of what it cost to run a TV commercial or run a newspaper ad. Today, digital advertising costs from $3 to $10 for every 1,000 customer “impressions”, versus $22 to $1,300 per person reached via traditional media. Moreover, it’s far harder to find your most receptive consumers with a billboard or TV commercial than a social-media ad, and far, far harder to measure its impact in real time.

Mass advertising quickly became a relic of the 20th century, and the economic floor it was holding up for the journalism industry collapsed. By 2017, The New York Times‘s net income was just $4 million, and that wasn’t even its worst year (in 2011, it actually lost money). In the 12 years following 2008, newsroom employment dropped by more than a quarter. Laid-off reporters were as mundane a part of this new landscape as the 20-something software engineers making doctors’ salaries.

Substack created an alternative to this business model by shifting the journalism tax from advertisers directly onto consumers. Now, instead of indirectly subsidizing reporters’ careers by buying products from the companies that market them through print ads and TV spots, readers could pay them directly via the online marketplace of journalism that is Substack.

The problem with this model is obvious: it will never come close to producing revenue on the scale that mass advertising generated for media corporations. From the perspective of advertisers, of course, that’s a good thing: their profits aren’t being siphoned off by an industry they have nothing to do with. From the perspective of news consumers, though, it sucks. It means less journalism, and journalism of a much lower quality.

The upside, some might argue, is that journalists are now truly independent. When you’re not controlled by editors and producers who answer to corporate bosses who answer to shareholders, you can report candidly without fear of professional repercussions. There isn’t an upper floor of suits to stop you from running a story on the corruption of defense contractors because the toothpaste company that’s the network’s biggest primetime advertiser owns an overseas subsidiary that manufactures land mines. Or, to take a real example, a parent company that censors your reporting on the tobacco industry out of fear of a potential lawsuit that could disrupt a pending corporate merger.

Your only bosses are your readers, and what they expect of you is honesty and integrity. The incentive to do good journalism aligns with the incentive of making money. That’s the theory, at least.

But that theory both overstates the level of corporate control over the old model and understates the malign influences insinuated into the new one. Noam Chomsky might have you believe that New York Times editors and NBC News producers once quaked in fear of the punishment they would face from their industrially polluting advertisers if they reported too honestly about industrial pollution. As Chomsky wrote in his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: “Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers”.

But the nice thing about mass advertising was that there was so much of it that individual advertisers rarely had that kind of clout.

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There may have been some vague sensibility among media professionals about not wanting to fall too far afield of the establishment, but that wasn’t rooted in anxiety over advertiser boycotts; it was rooted in publishers sharing the same alma maters as Congressmen and corporate executives and their kids going to the same private schools. In an exception that proves the rule, the 2017 Steven Spielberg movie The Post portrayed former Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham as a national hero for putting the public interest ahead of her personal relationship with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when she approved publication of the Pentagon Papers.

If anything, the pressures that the new model exerts on journalists are more direct and specific. Journalists who work for major media outlets are salaried employees; journalists who sell Substack subscriptions are small-time entrepreneurs. At least in establishment media outlets, there are institutional divisions between the editorial side and the business side. When you’re selling your reporting directly to readers, by contrast, there is no firewall in your brain that separates the part that’s thinking about what you’re reporting and how you’re reporting it from the part that is thinking about how this story will affect your subscriber base and thus your bank account.

Altogether, this makes Substack ripe for audience capture. You have very good reasons not to report on stories that might upset your readers or to arrive at conclusions that might anger them. You have equally good reasons to serve them slop that confirms their priors. After years of watching your subscriber graph go up and down, and the Stripe payments to your bank account get bigger and smaller, eventually you shape your newsletter into a product. And since your newsletter is, effectively, you, you have made yourself into that product. You might not have to worry about some corporate suit telling you what you can or can’t say, but that’s only because you are that suit and you’re telling it to yourself. The call is coming from inside the house.

If Taylor Lorenz’s experience is indicative of a larger pattern, these perverse incentives are only going to get worse as people’s paid subscriber bases dry up. Substack’s executives would have you believe that the consumer market for email newsletters is only getting bigger. But it’s easy to imagine another possibility. As Scott Carney has written, Substack is growing its user base principally by attracting more people to Notes, its Twitter knock-off. The theory appears to be that people will come for the social media and stay for the paid newsletters.

But that doesn’t seem to be working out, particularly for Substacks that aren’t already on the leaderboards (why do they even have leaderboards?). People who like to scroll aren’t necessarily people who pay to read long-form essays. My own paid subscriber count has proceeded along the same downward path that both Lorenz’s and Carney’s have, even as my tallies of free subscriber and “followers” (whatever that is) have stacked up. If that’s happening for many others, we can expect that as paid subscribers become scarcer, the incentives to gain and retain them will become harder to resist. More and more Substack writers will conform to the demands of the market by flattering their readers, avoiding risky topics, arriving at prefabricated conclusions, and repeating formulas that have worked in the past. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

In other words, Substack hasn’t fixed the broken media model: it hasn’t even attempted to. All it has done is giggify it. That has given some established reporters the freedom to do their own thing and made a handful of already famous and wealthy journalists even more famous and wealthy — good things, I guess. But it has also likely further degraded the already broken-down institutional structure of the journalism profession. That might bring joy to a few nihilists who simply despise the establishment media, but that doesn’t make it progress. It just makes it another step towards the death of the craft.

***

This essay was adapted from Leighton Woodhouse’s Social Studies Substack.

In 2014, this quiet 24 year old from rural Guangdong jumped from the 17th floor of a mall in Shenzhen, just across the road from his favorite bookshop. His death reverberated across China, drawing attention to his beautiful and disarming poetry, as well as to the despair of millions of factory laborers across the nation. By evoking images of spare parts, discarded screws and lumps of iron, Xu used China’s most revered classical art form to articulate the degrading experience of modernity.

A few years later, an essay by live-in nanny Fan Yusu also became a surprise literary sensation. “My life,” she began, “is a book that is unbearable to read.” While Fan cared for wealthier people’s children in Beijing, she mourned her “left behind” children in “motherless villages”. She worried that they, too, could “become screws in the world factory and terracotta soldiers on the assembly line”.

Neither Xu nor Fan set out to write political tracts. Their verse and prose were coping mechanisms, efforts of profound humility and humanity, and that’s what made them so heartbreaking. These so-called “bottom-rung”, or diceng, writers forced people at every level of Chinese society to confront the fate of those who had been forsaken during the years of economic uplift, which saw millions of people move from the countryside to the cities in search of factory jobs.

At the time, Marxists and those on the New Left saw migrants as poignant symbols of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) discordant messaging: socialist ideology foregrounded ordinary workers, while free-market economics required their cheap labor and exploitation. Living on the outskirts of new towns and cities without official residence permits (hukou) or access to any form of social security, China’s estimated 274 million rural-to-urban migrants have lost their ideological status. They have gone from being celebrated by the regime as “worker peasants” to the pejoratively labeled “floating population”, “vagrants” or “I-slaves”. These city workers have effectively become illegal migrants in their own country and, unwittingly, central protagonists in China’s contemporary identity crisis. From such despair, a powerful new literary movement has sprung.

China has long had an established literary genre of “bottom-rung” fiction, rooted in a belief that literature should “flip minds” and awaken people to the suffering of others. But now, the confluence of industrialization with widespread internet access in China has given rise to perhaps the largest working-class literature movement in history. These writers are telling their stories on their phones, in literary forums or in self-published worker magazines — whether or not the Party approves of them as “pure” literature.

The latest of these writers to capture China’s imagination is gig worker Hu Anyan, whose memoir I Deliver Parcels in Beijing will be published in English later this month, two years after it went viral in China. At the time of writing, Hu had already worked 19 jobs since leaving school, including as a waiter, bike seller, popsicle wholesaler and delivery driver. As a delivery driver, Hu suffered daily humiliations. He was blamed for failing to keep fresh a notoriously smelly durian fruit, when no one was at home to receive it; penalized for late deliveries even if a customer gave the wrong address; and refused entry to malls because of his garish, low-class uniform.

However, his artistic spirit sustained him. A few years before, Hu’s eyes had been opened to the world of literature when he worked as an unpaid drawing apprentice with a comic book publisher. He and a bunch of fellow anime enthusiasts listened to punk, talked up rebellion and individualism, and read Kafka. “From then on,” he writes, “both work and writing became ways for me to build my spirit.” The group committed to writing and reading “wild works” — edgy underground comics and literature that couldn’t be published anywhere except on subversive online forums — and to rejecting any work that resembled “tamed livestock that had long lost its animal nature”. In an age of intense pragmatism and material ambition, Hu instead devoted himself to the humanities.

In his book, Hu argues that the only way to maintain one’s individuality and sanity in the age of Big Data is to remember what it is that makes us human, and to resist the algorithm at all costs. “What I learned was that so long as I didn’t care about being efficient, if I forgot about my return on investment, then every customer was easy to get along with,” writes Hu, with an almost child-like innocence.

Hu’s memoir has sold more than two million copies in China, and a TV adaptation is already in the works. Its popularity signifies a deep philosophical shift in China, and reflects a widespread feeling that the China Dream is over. Whereas white-collar workers once read factory-worker writers like Xu Lizhi and Fan Yusu with a degree of disconnected sympathy, Hu’s experience of gig work resonated with them. Seeing themselves as products of the “gaokao factory” (China’s incredibly stressful university entrance exams), and competitors in an immensely oversaturated job market, graduates have started to re-brand themselves as “IT peasants”. There’s increasingly a sense of communality with those migrant workers who have felt this despair all along.

For “bottom-rung” workers, the myth of social mobility died long before China’s slowing economy started to worry those higher up the ladder. But in its place, a devotion to the humanities has blossomed. While the majority of lower-rung authors write for no other reason than to process menial work into something meaningful, they have created a growing folk tradition of life outside the system. Migrant dorms and communes are places where artists, vloggers, musicians and writers nurture a freewheeling, troubadour spirit. Picun village on the outskirts of Beijing, which was home to thousands of migrants before it was demolished in 2023, was famous for its New Workers Art Troupe and the Picun Literature Group, in which workers hosted pop-up exhibitions, gigs, plays and poetry readings. More recently, artist Li Liao exhibited his scooter and screenshots from his Meituan “super app” at a gallery in Shenzhen, rural migrant Wang Haijia was dubbed “the courier poet” for his widely shared poem “People in a Hurry”, and 23-year-old Song Yucai become an online sensation for singing on the streets of Chengdu after grueling days out on his bike.

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Many white-collar workers are following their lead, turning back to the humanities, and even returning to the countryside to work the land. Having been warned against studying non-vocational subjects by anxious parents and strident educational influencers, the young have decided they no longer want earning potential to shape their decisions. Interest is growing in rural reconstruction movements such as the Bishan project — a rural commune committed to bringing modern ideas and culture back to traditional village life that was shut down by the local government in 2016. And people continue to intentionally set up libraries and artistic communities away from cities. The countryside is once again becoming a place of the imagination.

Rattled by the prospect of graduates turning into a bunch of work-shy hippies, Xi Jinping announced in 2021 that it was necessary to stop what he called this trend of “involution” and “laying down”. One way to do this was to “disrobe”. In a public ticking-off of disillusioned university graduates, state broadcaster CCTV suggested they consider “taking off the long gown”. This is a reference to a story by one of China’s most revered writers, Lu Xun, in which failed scholar Kong Yiji insists on wearing the “long gown”, the sartorial symbol of wealth and education, in contrast to the “short jackets” worn by the poor and uneducated. The moral of the story is that status is a trap and those who cling to it are obtuse and conceited. By continuing to ally itself with Lu Xun, a writer beloved by Mao, the CCP is trying to shift the focus away from its own economic responsibilities towards China’s workforce to the moral responsibilities of the individual.

One proponent of disrobing is Ding Yuanzhao, a graduate of Oxford as well as China’s two most prestigious universities, Tsinghua and Peking, who this year was forced to sign up as a delivery driver when he couldn’t find a suitable job. It offered him a stable income, he told the Oxford Mail cheerfully, and it enabled him to “make a contribution to society”. He will not be the last scholar destined for a wardrobe change.

In her science fiction story Folding Beijing, Chinese novelist Hao Jingfang imagined a future in which the different classes of society were physically separated into three spaces, and that traveling between them was a criminal offense. Now it seems possible that white-collar and blue-collar workers are folding into one. Automation, algorithms and AI pose existential threats to everyone’s role in society; all workers will end up competing for similar jobs. In such a world, literature offers an opportunity to live beyond the rat race.

The fact that “good” as opposed to “gas station” coffee exists at all in the Land of the Free is, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon. As late as the 1950s, the coffee trader Alfred Peet arrived in California and asked: “I came to the richest country in the world, so why are they drinking the lousiest coffee?”

By the mid-sixties, he had set up Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Berkeley — and not long after that, he met Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker, university friends who dreamed of opening a coffee-roasting business. The three learned the method from Alfred Peet and then, 50 years ago this week, opened the first branch of their own gourmet coffee shop in Seattle. They named it Starbucks.

By 1987, when the three founders sold the company to Howard Schulz, they had six Seattle outlets. Schulz, though, had bigger dreams: by the time the company went public in in 1992, Starbucks had 140 outlets and annual revenues of over $73m. Six years later, the chain cruised into the UK market with the purchase of 56 “Seattle Coffee Company” stores, just in time to catch Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” wave.

The British reaction to appealing-but-invasive cultural phenomena from across the Atlantic is usually ambivalent, and my dim recollection of Starbucks’s arrival is that it was no exception. Its blonde wood and exposed brick aesthetic carried a faint whiff of the “Central Perk” aspirational lifestyle we’d all inhaled via innumerable episodes of Friends. And yet many of my circle felt there was something creepy about the identikit outlets and standardised chumminess. Equally, though, buying a coffee in late 1990s Britain was a game of roulette, that could result in anything from a cup of acrid instant to a sludgy filter brew. Starbucks was at least reliable.

So if the feeling toward Starbucks was officially grudging, it was also covertly appreciative, like turning up to a glamorous friend’s party and complaining about the music while filling your handbag with canapés. But perhaps we were right to be grudging. For in a sense Starbucks has sold back to us a deracinated, virtual form of something that’s inseparable from the birth of modern Britain: the public sphere.

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Britain in the 1990s had little in the way of café culture, but 1690s Britain very much did. The first English coffee house was set up in Oxford around 1650, by a Greek named Pasqual Rosée. The new drink rapidly became popular, and the Londoner Thomas Rugge claimed that by the late 1650s coffee was “sold almost in every street”.

Coffee houses soon became hubs across the country for a new, radically egalitarian public life, open to all comers. In 1673, one pamphleteer described how in a coffee house “oft you may see a silly fop, and a worshipful justice, a griping rook… a reverend Nonconformist, and a canting mountebank, all blended together”. They were also hotbeds of political radicalism: Charles II was so concerned about their role fomenting dissent that he tried to ban them in 1675. And in 1696, Jonathan’s coffee house in London became notorious as the meeting-place for members of a plot to assassinate William III.

By the early eighteenth century, coffee shop culture was the epicentre of social and commercial life. The insurer Lloyds of London had its origins in Lloyds coffeehouse, while Jonathan’s had, by the turn of the century, become the centre of London’s emerging financial services market: public lists of stock and commodity prices were posted there, turning a coffee-shop into the City’s first embryonic trading floor.

Coffee also fuelled art, literature and scandal. Buttons coffee house, founded in 1712 by Joseph Addison, housed a white marble letterbox in the shape of a lion’s head believed to have been designed by William Hogarth. Visitors were invited to post tips, news, gossip and other interesting content into the letterbox and the best would be printed in Addison’s Guardian newspaper (no relation to its current namesake).

Over time, the artistic, commercial and political spheres that blossomed in England’s 17^th and 18^th-century coffee houses were formalised and shifted away into their own official premises. This fuelled the creation of modern London’s magnificent architecture, from the City to the Palace of Westminster, Whitehall to Theatreland. Lloyds of London is still going — now in its own iconically ugly skyscraper on Leadenhall Street. And the trading club that formed at Jonathan’s persisted after the building burned down, eventually creating their own premises which became the London Stock Exchange.

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Today, though, our commercial, artistic and political lives are increasingly independent of any physical place. The tips, gossip and witticisms that went into the Buttons letterbox now get posted to Twitter; the stock tips traded at Jonathan’s are now shared on the day-trader forums of Reddit or Wallstreetbets. Meanwhile, political radicalism happens on Discord or (when it’s not facing Charles II-like efforts to ban it) Parler.

Public life takes place online; and much of its spadework is increasingly done by lone individuals, staring at laptops in today’s reboot of coffee house culture, of which the Platonic Form is Starbucks. And in this we’re seeing the fruition of that indefinable something that made people uneasy when Starbucks first arrived.

Because although it delivered reliable coffee, there was always something unsettling about Starbucks. At the time, my social circle was much given to anti-capitalist protest; we lumped together Starbucks with McDonald’s, that longstanding byword for crass Americanisation among old-school reactionaries and anti-capitalists alike.

But Starbucks wasn’t just McDonald’s for coffee. Whether or not you like a Big Mac, the McDonald’s brand is genuinely classless: populist in palate, affordable in price, tolerant even of life’s outsiders. Chris Arnade has written movingly about how McDonald’s branches are today a meeting-point for the lonely, impoverished and left-behind people of “back-row America”.

Starbucks, on the other hand, sold an image of affordably hygienic detachment from all such messy human dregs. This new aesthetic, as placeless as an airport departure lounge, is best described with a word that’s often used in a positive way by advocates of a future where this detachment is taken to its logical extreme: “frictionless”.

The stereotypical frictionless person is neatly but unobtrusively dressed, works from a laptop anywhere in the world and pays contactless for everything. What the Starbucks brand offered was entry-level frictionlessness; an environment with reliable drinks, a standardised “third space” with WiFi and — crucially — a zone purged of modernity’s losers, such as drunks, provincials and the homeless. This table-stakes frictionlessness was designed to be just cheap enough for the new proletariat of the virtualised world: students and gig-economy laptop workers.

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By Gareth Roberts

In other words, the company updated 18^th-century coffee-house public life for the virtual age by creating standardised zones, each of which could be anywhere in the world. It offered spaces tailor-made for those who wish to participate in a public life that, even by the early noughties, was increasingly moving online, and who wished to do so from anywhere in the world.

So what, you might ask. But this severing of life from place isn’t just an aesthetic matter. Beneath the rollout of identikit coffee-shops and the geographic uprooting of the laptop class lies a question with a real-world punch: who cashes in? My friends in the “Space Hijackers” anti-gentrification campaign were calling out Starbucks twenty years ago for driving competitor establishments out of business by subsidising under-performing stores until local competitors folded. To the Hijackers, the synthetically chummy Starbucks aesthetic was a paper-thin veneer for a rapacious form of capitalism indifferent to local texture.

Two decades later, it’s clear that this combination of standardisation, convenience and the use of aggressive corporate practices to eliminate local, independent competition has become a classic template for success in the digital age. Ride-hailing app Uber, for example, based its whole growth plan on using fundraising to subsidise fares so as to drive other players (read: independent taxi firms and self-employed drivers) out of the market.

This approach to commerce rejects all allegiance to place, seeking not just to destroy local independents but also to minimise national tax liabilities. That’s principally how Starbucks paid just £4m in UK tax in 2019 despite raking in £387m in sales. It’s not just Starbucks either: in 2019, HMRC began investigating Uber for tax avoidance, while the Government also hopes to close a tax loophole routinely employed by Big Tech to evade tax by paying “royalties” to divisions based overseas.

But even as national governments increasingly crackdown on these new, frictionless oligarchs, the goalposts continue to move. In 2018, for example, Starbucks began restructuring away from city-centre outlets toward online ordering and drive-through. Thanks to the internet, even the standardised, placeless places Starbucks brought to our high streets are becoming redundant.

And here, perhaps, lies the clue as to why all those noughties protests against Starbucks had no impact, despite being accurate in their diagnosis. The protests focused on Starbucks; but Starbucks was never the problem. The homogenising force that first stripped the localism from coffee shops and is now digitising Starbucks outlets was never the coffee chain.

It was the internet itself. One day, we may want our neighbourhoods — our places — back. If so, we may find ourselves wrestling with how to unplug it. Or if we even can.

We can all agree that slavery is morally abhorrent. But Hawley’s legislative focus, however admirable, is somewhat myopic: he and other policymakers also need to focus attention on other forms of labour exploitation occurring right under their collective noses in America’s “gig economy”, in which benefits and protections that were key components of our employment laws for many decades are now being rapidly unwound.

No company better exemplifies this trend than Uber. The company’s exploitation of workers is symptomatic of the rise of what author Albena Azmanova has called “precarity capitalism” in her new book, Capitalism on Edge, a condition that Professor James Galbraith has described as “a minority ensconced in a diminishing set of safe career paths or sufficient wealth not to bother worrying about [economic insecurity], and a majority living in persistent anxiety over the costs of health, housing, education, the quality of public services and other formerly ordinary attributes of middle-class life.”

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What makes this trend particularly galling is that the main economic drivers of this transition to 21^st-century serfdom fancy themselves as enlightened, socially “woke” corporations, but in fact embrace employment practices worthy of the 19th century Gilded Age.

The company uses retrograde tactics to circumvent existing labour law via the “independent contractor” loophole, which allows them to deny their work force traditional employee benefits, such as healthcare, sick leave and holiday pay, themselves the products of many decades of hard-earned reform. And even with these 19^th century work practices, Uber still can’t generate positive cash flow, let alone sustain profitability. There’s no reason why a company with this kind of business model should exist.

In a genuinely independent contractor relationship, the quid pro quo is higher pay as an offset towards the lack of paid benefits. But companies such as Uber don’t operate this way: drivers earn around $9-$10 per an hour, and they can’t expand revenues because they haven’t got the ability to set their own prices or unilaterally expand their customer base. That’s left in the hands of Uber’s management. So, the only option drivers have is to drive more hours.

But when a driver is making less than the minimum wage, driving more hours considerably impinges on one’s alleged work-time flexibility. It also adversely impacts the ability to generate sufficient earnings to afford decent benefits, such as adequate health insurance (which is not a public good in the US), let alone enjoy any kind of leisure that the alleged “flexible” working hours purportedly facilitate. Out of economic necessity, all “free time” is effectively commercialised.

The much vaunted “independence” allegedly derived from Uber’s model, therefore, is more apparent than real: as the National Labor Relations Board report notes, Uber’s so-called “entrepreneurs” have “no control over how they deliver rides… are ‘supervised’ by semi-automated and algorithmic systems that track their acceptance rates, time on trips, speed, customer ratings, and other factors, and drivers can be ‘deactivated’ based on these factors”.

It’s a modern day version of Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon”, a disciplinary concept which was originally brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. Uber has now taken the idea one stage further, importing the concept into their workforce via 21^st century surveillance technology.

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In many respects, Congress is lagging the courts, which are moving quickly to rectify loopholes that have allowed the employment conditions at companies like Uber to become a form of indentured servitude. A California superior court judge recently denied injunctive relief to both Uber and Lyft. This means that they will be forced to comply with earlier rulings, and a California state statute, which mandated them to reclassify their workers as employees, rather than “independent contractors” (although the California Court of Appeal has recently pushed back the original 20 August deadline to October while it considers Uber’s full appeal). The original court decision also confirms a similar ruling made by a New York federal judge last month.

These are also consistent with a growing number of decisions in other countries, such as the UK, where Uber is now appealing a lower court ruling that its drivers should be classified as employees “entitled to employment protections such as a minimum wage and holiday pay”, and in Canada, where the country’s Supreme Court has recently ruled that Uber drivers were entitled to sue for traditional benefits and vacation pay. In spite of the Canadian Supreme Court decision, Uber is still trying to keep its Canadian drivers from joining or starting class-action lawsuits against the company in the hope that the drivers will be intimidated by the contract to avoid seeking legal remedies, even though Uber legally cannot prevent them from pursuing class action lawsuits.

What is key about the judgments is that they comprehensively demolish the myths championed by gig economy employers like Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, confirming what many of us already knew: any concept of independence is nonsensical, given the massive imbalance in the relationship. Indeed, the UK Court of Appeals went even further, characterising Uber’s description of the work relationship as “a sham”, because the company exercises full control over its employees but attempts to escape the reciprocal obligations of that relationship by designating them as independent contractors.

The legal side accords with economic reality: the fact is that the existing business models of companies such as Uber were unsustainable by any measure, even before their now exploitive labour practices were challenged in the courts. Uber continues to lose a lot of money, only surviving by virtue of an ongoing high IPO bubble that has infused it with cash to staunch the red ink. It’s a form of “Ponzi finance,” a condition that the economist Hyman Minsky defined as “the cash flows from operations [being insufficient] to fulfill either the repayment of principle or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations”.

Minsky’s definition fits Uber perfectly. Over the past four and a half years, Uber has lost $23.2 billion and the company has higher operating costs than the taxi companies it is seeking to displace. In other words, without illegal exploitation models, the rate of financial losses would far exceed their ability to raise cash from the credulous finance and investment world. That IPO bubble also sustains the stock price, which has turned Uber’s upper management into millionaires.

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None of this seems to matter much to Khosrowshahi. In a piece for the New York Times, the Uber CEO decried the lack of flexibility in current labour law which he claimed denies workers the freedoms to choose the way they work and when they do it. He went on to argue that the pay versus benefits argument was a “false choice” and that “our current employment system is outdated and unfair”.

In reality, the trade-offs between traditional employment and the gig style labour practices that Khosrowshahi lauds in his article are gradually disappearing. Covid-19 has created a situation in which many of the extolled benefits of the gig economy, such as working from home or choosing one’s hours of employment, are gradually being imported into a multiplicity of jobs, without subverting the protections and benefits afforded by traditional employment practices.

It is true that many of these jobs will ultimately revert to office environments. But a recent report from the Stanford Institute for Policy Research persuasively argues that working from home and other such features of the gig economy are likely to be expanded in other businesses that are not reliant on a medieval labour model to sustain profitability.

Ultimately, Uber hopes to render the debate on their employment practices moot: management’s long-term goal is to use their “contractors” to establish a consumer base, while they work to perfect the robotic technology that ultimately enables the company to replace their workforce with self-driving cars. That is their only plausible path to profitability (assuming of course, that their self-driving cars eventually develop the capacity to recognise a pedestrian, so that they don’t kill them).

Courts around the world have started to close the loopholes exploited by companies such as Uber. But that’s not enough: governments must build on those judgments, eliminate the loopholes, and thereby reaffirm the rights and protections for gig economy workers built up over decades. If Uber threatens to cease operations, fine. Much as we prevent sweatshops or exploitive child labour, no business that sustains serf labour practices should be allowed to operate in a civilized society just for the sake of fattening the pockets of a few.

Something else is happening too, as we stand in our doorways making a noise: there is a certain relief in making ourselves visible again, at simply being physically on the street at the same time as a significant number of other people, albeit while ‘socially distanced’.

Many of those who are now shut indoors, particularly white-collar workers, are unused to being invisible. They are accustomed to being endlessly busy and seen to be busy, in offices, in meetings, with an ever-changing cast of people. (‘busy,’ after all, had become one of the chief indicators of modern merit.)

Now, many higher-paid workers find that both their visibility and their perceived importance has been unexpectedly muted, while that of others has soared. At the same time, many among them are also understandably worried about their livelihoods in a post-Covid landscape.

This alteration in perceptions of value — a national redistribution of esteem — has happened very rapidly. Within a few weeks, the advent of Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown — amid an unprecedented peacetime death toll — has pared Britain down and exposed the essential workings and workers of our country.

Most notably, there are those at the NHS front-line, united in a communal effort to prevent the very sick from dying. Around them are the others who help to keep the entire populace fed, watered and safe from harm, including workers in the emergency services and transport, delivery and food supply networks. Among the remainder of the population, there is a new intensity of gratitude felt towards those who brave potential infection to assist others.

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Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

And yet — in recent years, well before Covid-19 struck — the life of a ‘key worker’ in many parts of the UK was proving ever more of a struggle. Last year, Mark Chiverton, a Unison representative for the south-east, representing public service workers, told its local government conference: “It is almost impossible now for many of our members to live in many of our towns and cities, with homes out of reach.”

The problem was worst in London. In 2015, commentators such as Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times were observing that London property was not only unaffordable for essential workers on relatively low salaries — such as nurses, firefighters, hospital porters and ambulance drivers — but increasingly so also for middle-class professionals such as doctors, teachers and professors. The complaint had been heard for many years before, of course — intensifying since the financial crisis of 2008 — but nothing decisive on the part of the government was done to address it.

The escalating cost of renting or buying London property — an increasingly attractive investment for large companies and overseas buyers — was damaging both its social coherence and its wider economy. In terms of housing, London had gradually priced out first its working-class, and then its younger middle-class, particularly those with families.

Three years ago, a report called Estimating The Value of Discounted Rental Accommodation had found that this skewing led to mass relocation from the inner to the outer boroughs of London, or further afield. It came, researchers said, at a cost to the capital of billions of pounds a year, and risked resulting in a pattern of financial segregation similar to that of Paris, in which the city centre is serviced by a large population who mainly live in densely-populated suburbs.

One of the authors of the study, Professor Peter Urwin, said that “the wage of a teacher, or nurse or tourism worker is much lower than the productive contribution they make to the economy and society’” — something long recognised, but more often informally expressed in hazy terms of moral rather than economic worth, and thereby more easily ignored by policy-makers.

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Urwin’s report, however, estimated that supplying subsidised rental housing to ‘key workers’ resulted in an average benefit of £27,000 per household to the capital’s economy. If the average cost of the subsidy for affordable homes was £14,000, as he calculated, then the net gain to the economy for each household stood at £12,500 or so. The alternative would be that — given a choice between a struggling city-centre life, and a more affordable life even with a potentially stressful commute — key workers would increasingly either choose the latter, or simply leave London entirely and find jobs in their new locality.

Despite some valiant local efforts, to date there has been no coherent national strategy to resolve this situation. Serial Conservative leaders have clung to versions of Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policy of ‘right to buy’ for social housing stock, even as rates of building new social housing remain very low. As such stock has steadily dwindled, need has increased, and both homelessness and social housing waiting lists have soared.

While home ownership remains an ideal for many, it has long been clear that security of tenure at a manageable cost — of the kind once widely guaranteed by a strong social housing supply — would fundamentally change the deep sense of precariousness now experienced by so many lower-paid workers and younger people.

Housing has long been both one of the public’s most fundamental concerns, and a growing source of political disruption. In a Britain suddenly reshaped by Covid-19, these already pressing considerations of who is housed where, and with what measure of security, are going to take on a new and even more urgent form.

Housing, though, is only the most obvious in a succession of policies over a number of decades which has made ordinary life more difficult for many of those on low to moderate salaries, including a high proportion of those in ‘key worker’ roles. Between 2011 and 2018, most public sector pay was frozen or capped at a 1% rise, outstripped by inflation. Why has the UK government’s treatment of its most necessary citizens been so cavalier?

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A partial explanation might be that where culture leads, policy follows. In the decades immediately following the shared national effort and trauma of the Second World War, social status attached to ideals of duty, hard work and sacrifice. To some extent war had been a democratising force: the Princess Elizabeth had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and trained as a driver and mechanic. When Buckingham Palace took a direct hit during the Blitz in September 1940, the Queen Mother famously said, “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

Without idealising those decades, or glossing over their inequalities, there was nonetheless a post-war acceptance that it was the job of government to provide the public with broad access to decent healthcare, education, and secure housing of reliable quality. Orwell, writing during the war, had predicted that “this war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.”

That wasn’t wholly true, of course, but the war had certainly resulted in a greater equality of perceived value, which demanded its echo in public policy. Politicians answered the call: in the early 1950s, for example, Harold Macmillan, then the Conservative housing minister, launched an ambitious housing drive which successfully committed to delivering 300,000 new homes a year.

In recent decades, however, perceptions of public value have grown increasingly patchy and distorted. I have lived through much of that period of distortion, and — as with all personal observations — memories must be handled with care. But I can certainly recall that in my childhood in the 1970s and early 80s the prevailing adult judgement of other people related to the word ‘decent’ — not in the sense of ‘respectable’, but in that of good-hearted, kind and willing to put oneself out for other people.

Money was useful, we were given to understand, and could provide for a greater degree of comfort and opportunity: if you were comfortably off, as we were, you were lucky and should be grateful. Both my parents had grown up in working-class Belfast families with little money to spare, and so they appreciated the security a higher income could provide.

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But they also understood that having money had no bearing on someone’s essential decency, and often existed in inverse proportion to that valuable quality. This wasn’t an unusual view then, and I don’t expect it is now — at least not within families and close-knit communities, where people are dependent on one another and have the ability to observe personal characteristics at close quarters. Yet for the past few decades it has not been reflected in the broader culture of the UK.

One of the first changes was that personal value began increasingly to be signalled by the possession of ‘designer’ gear. I remember a distinct excitement when a Next store first came to Belfast in the mid-Eighties, and clothes from there were at first considered ‘designer’ — until the concept of ‘designer’ travelled further into the higher echelons of cost throughout the 90s, to the point at which flashing a  £1,000 handbag or teetering through the streets in a pair of Manolos somehow established you as a person of desirability and taste.

At the same time, the word ‘chav’ began to be widely used to describe working-class people, especially those who appeared to be signalling their status through material possessions (something which those in higher income brackets were already frequently doing, but with different accents and approval ratings.) A ‘chav’ was urban, sexually unrestrained, low on educational aspirations but high on booze and bling, and seemingly undeserving of wider support. Both the term ‘chav’ and its usage were soaked in snobbery.

From the new millennium onwards, a new class-based cruelty was reflected in — now discontinued — television shows such as Jeremy Kyle, which put hard-up guests, often from difficult backgrounds or with addictions, on display before studio audiences for popular censure and mockery. Culture was dividing society more explicitly into winners and losers: even peak-time programmes such as Big Brother or the X-Factor encouraged an atmosphere of voyeurism and selective humiliation for those who failed to judge either their own talents or the nuances of self-presentation accurately.

Poverty was increasingly depicted not as a practical material condition but as a form of moral disease, seemingly experienced by those who failed to budget properly, or were reluctant to work. At the same time, however, a number of London hotels began catering to the new international super-rich, with suites priced upwards of £10,000 a night. The old feeling in Britain that there was something inherently repellent about such obvious excess had been replaced by a new climate of deference to it. 

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Yet as the ‘gig economy’ became established, and employment benefits grew more precarious, the fast-expanding ranks of the ‘working poor’ found their daily reality was very far indeed from the spendthrift caricature of the worse-off. Members of this group were increasingly counting every hard-won penny. A study in March found that three-quarters of children in relative poverty in the UK were in families where at least one adult was in work — something that is likely to be sharply exacerbated by the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

***

At the beginning, the virus was occasionally spoken of as “a great equaliser” and in a few aspects that is true. We’re all on lockdown, with only necessary exceptions. The virus seized the heir to the throne, and sent the Prime Minister to intensive care.  Famous people now film themselves cutting their own hair. International travel is banned, and social life has shrunk to Zoom calls and socially distanced walks.

Yet the more we know about Covid-19, the more we discover that it is indeed discriminatory in its attack. Statistically there are worse outcomes for the elderly, those with underlying health conditions, men and BAME people. And the risk of catching it is heightened by existing inequalities: it is much harder to stay virus-free, for example, if you already live in overcrowded accommodation, have to take the Tube to work at rush hour, or are a ‘key worker’ with insufficient PPE.

It is hard right now to imagine the shape of a post-Covid UK — but even if this pandemic is wrestled under control, the awareness of the effect that might be wrought by another one in the future will write society an altered script. 

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Some changes may play out naturally. With packed public transport recognised as a potential source of contagion, it will make more sense for ‘key workers’ in London and other UK cities to be housed nearer their city-centre workplaces, so that they can walk or cycle to work. A proportion of city-centre office space could fall empty or be converted to housing, as higher numbers of white-collar employees work from home; more affordable city rental properties suddenly become available for a greater number of people. Across the UK, the future may be simultaneously more spread out and more local, with ‘The Great Wen’ no longer exerting its outsize magnetic tug.

The most severe impact of the economic devastation will fall, as it invariably does, upon those who have the least financial security to begin with. But the precise nature of how government responds to the extreme challenges of the post-corona future, and whom it supports, will also — in large part — be determined by the demonstrable strength of public opinion.

Let us assume that ministers, and Boris Johnson in particular — whose life was recently saved by the NHS — are genuine in their admiration and gratitude for the health service and its workers. Yet already that gratitude does not seem to be translating into unambiguous policy. 

Last week the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, indicated that migrant healthcare workers, currently employed by the NHS and paying tax and National Insurance, must continue to pay the designated ‘immigration health surcharge’ to help fund the NHS, which will reach £625 per person later this year. An outraged British Medical Association correctly observed that ‘skilled international colleagues’ are putting their lives on the hospital frontline to fight Covid-19 in the UK, and that ‘it beggars belief that they are still being charged to use the very service they are working for.’

A leaked government document also hinted at a possible two-year NHS pay freeze, which met with outrage from unions and professional bodies — and was swiftly denied by the Prime Minister with the emphatic words: “Absolutely not. Anyone who suggests that can sit on it.” But the Prime Minister has robustly denied things which have come to pass before.    

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By Fiona Sturges

In the past 30 years or so, British society has gradually become more mesmerised by gossip, celebrity and wealth, and more respectful of people for how they appear and what they possess rather than what they actually do. The forces of glamour and entertainment gobbled up quieter, more altruistic measures of public service. An ‘influencer’ in his or her twenties, who could provide an online illusion of a desirable body and an aspirational life, held considerably more kudos than a middle-aged hospital porter or cleaner who managed to remain cheerful while doing arduous, necessary work day after day. Even conceptions of virtue became increasingly performative, more often located in joining vociferous denunciations on Twitter than in quietly emptying a bedpan or helping an elderly neighbour.

In a very short and disorienting time, these mores have been turned on their head: the public has a tendency to assess social worth more clear-sightedly when it is afraid. The real question is whether the aftermath of Covid-19 will translate into a more permanent alteration in society’s values. Wilde said that a cynic was someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, and I don’t think that the bulk of the British public is cynical. It can, however, be forgetful.

Yet unless the present sound of clapping is not to ring hollow in retrospect, the public will need to keep reminding the government that it expects a fundamental and long-lasting change in the treatment of those ‘key workers’ who keep the UK running.

For decades these employees have been steadily exposed to ever greater levels of insecurity, a kind of slow-grinding institutionalised contempt. Now they are regularly exposing themselves to Covid-19 in the name of duty, on behalf of the wider public. Will the rest of us remain grateful, once the clapping quietens down? I hope so. Let’s see.

Last week, the plight of an another maligned group — Instagram ‘influencers’ —  made the news. “Influencers’ glossy lifestyles lose their shine”, reported the BBC. The story was received with a mixture of schadenfreude and undisguised glee. “Hahaha time for social media ‘influencers’ to get a real fucking job like the rest of us,” read one not atypical tweet.

These influencers have gained enormous sway over the past years. Their greatest asset is a large social media following, which they use to promote certain products and get paid for doing so. It’s a similar sort of thing to sports stars being paid to wear a certain pair of boots or use a certain bat. But with Covid-19 hobbling many ‘lifestyle’ companies and international travel coming to a standstill, content sponsorship is drying up and marketing budgets are dwindling. And so the sun is setting on the influencer grift and everyone — everyone who isn’t an influencer, that is – is ecstatic.

My own feelings towards influencers are mixed. It’s true, the superficiality of Instagram culture can be wearing. The platform presents people as having perfect lives while the personalities that dominate it thirst for round-the-clock validation and elevate the moral value of ostentatious wealth. Men with chiselled bodies lounge around infinity pools surrounded by a bevy of young and gorgeous women. It purports to be aspirational yet it is a filtered and photoshopped world that is unattainable to the majority of people.

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And yet I cannot bring myself to celebrate thousands of (predominantly young) influencers losing their incomes almost overnight. All the jeering last week that they should ‘get a proper job’ doesn’t exactly feel like it comes from a wholesome place. And what is a ‘real job’, anyway? Must it be poorly paid and gruelling? I’m temperamentally inclined to admire those who’ve worked out a way to get paid for travelling around the world looking good.

Indeed, there is an attitude in this country that, as David Graeber wrote in his 2017 book Bullshit Jobs, “If you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right.” Get a real job is code for: get a job that makes you as miserable as I am. It’s a bit like the annoying auntie whose own marriage is the worst possible advert for the convention yet who constantly implores you to get married.

But of course, aspiration and envy are bedfellows. When the relationship between work and reward seems to break down, the scale tips towards envy. Many Instagrammers make themselves easy targets. It isn’t hard to hate those who implore us to #hustle and #grind as they do, when most of us know that the infinity pool and the $200,000 Birkin bag is always going to remain out of reach.

This was true before Covid-19; yet the decadent and glamorous lifestyles promoted by many influencers feel hopelessly out of kilter with the new reality of lockdown. We are heading into the mother of all recessions; death is everywhere; we are shuttered behind closed doors in our pyjamas eating comfort food and getting ever doughier. The last thing we want to look at is photoshopped fakery and motivational uplift, presented with a side  order of avocado toast. Each day is a struggle; nobody is a failure for not doing 100 push-ups and reading three pop-science books before breakfast.

The trouble is, as well as all the pouting models posting provocative snaps for an army of thirsty men, influence culture is dominated by self-help ‘gurus’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ who promote a value system where failure is a consequence of one not working one’s fingers to the bone. A quick search of the popular Instagram #hustle hashtag throws up thousands of representative memes: ‘Nobody cares about your degree when you drive a Lamborghini’; ‘Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him’; ‘You will never see this view [another Lamborghini] by working from 9-5’.

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This sort of pseudo-profundity is the digital equivalent of the ‘Live, Love, Laugh’ tat that hangs from the walls of some lower middle class homes, albeit with a neo-liberal slant. Materialism — fast cars, cartoonishly-sculpted women, jet-setting and bottle service — is the supreme value. It’s a value system that looks incongruent and rather perverse at a time when solidarity, compassion and collectivism are required to deal with a global pandemic. The perfect life was always unattainable. Now it is plain obnoxious.

Much of the online self-help genre had already come to resemble the old communist bloc billboards exhorting the proletariat to work harder for the rewards that were always just over the horizon. It encourages us to believe in the “imaginary universe” that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu held up as an ideological tenet of neoliberalism, a world of “perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world in which… every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything”. It is yet another incarnation of the meritocratic illusion that keeps the system going — and keeps you working yourself into an early grave.

Despite the glamorous image and ubiquitous capitalist uplift of the influencers, YouTubers and podcasters, this is a precarious world in which one’s income can quickly dry up. It is also a world in which influencers are frequently exploited by the big digital platforms. The fitness personality Joe Delaney — someone whose entertaining and informative content has helped a large number of people to get fit — recently detailed how he received just £4,697, over many months, for a YouTube video which clocked up over 4.2 million views.

The gig-slash-digital economy has repackaged older forms of exploitation — while in the media it has created a landscape that is more hospitable to fake news and demagogues. But it has given more people than ever an opportunity to follow their dreams. I’m an example of that myself: were it not for blogging I would almost certainly not be a writer.

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Part of the appeal of the digital economy lies in the way it has undercut the power of stuffy establishment gatekeepers. Uber was embraced by cab drivers — despite its exploitative business model — because the algorithm does not discriminate (at least in theory). There isn’t the same degree of favouritism at any rate. As one private hire driver phrased it to me, under the old way of doing things if a [taxi] controller didn’t like your face or the sound of your voice “you wouldn’t eat that week”. Apps such as Instagram, along with other social media channels, have diversified the route to fame and recognition; nepotistic gatekeepers have been swept aside.

The era in which the baby boomers grew up has an obvious and lingering appeal: free education and healthcare, plentiful jobs, good pensions. But many younger people have looked at the lives of their parents — broken by fruitless toil in office cubicles and worn down by loveless marriages they got tangled up in far too young — and thought: no thanks. One manifestation of this is people forging their own path through the new social media platforms that have sprung up over recent years.

There is quite a lot that is wrong with the superficiality and validation-seeking that is ubiquitous on Instagram. Indeed, the lockdown has provided many of us with the impetus to take a much-needed digital detox. But those glibly celebrating the possibility that Instagram influencers will have to go back, cap in hand, to traditional employers are betraying their own limited horizons. Instagram’s hyper-capitalist porn may leave a bad taste in the mouth. But then, so does begrudging someone making a living doing something they enjoy.

Amazon warehouse workers are called ‘Associates’. When they are dismissed they are not sacked, fired or made redundant, but instead ‘released’. Budding Uber drivers are greeted during their ‘onboarding’ (hiring) by a hipster in jeans and t-shirt who talks in the language of a ubiquitous ‘hustle porn’ Instagram post that fetishises excessive overworking. Deliveroo couriers are referred to patronisingly as ‘Roos’ by management.

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Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

John Steinbeck said that socialism never took root in the United States because the American dream encouraged the poor to consider themselves not as a downtrodden proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Gig employers appear to be attempting to pull a similar trick on their employees – sorry, ‘partners’. “We’re here to make money. If your wheels aren’t turning, you aren’t earning”, I was told by an enthusiastic Uber employee when I drove for the company back in 2017.

I worked as a cab driver – or as an ‘entrepreneur’, if you are to believe Uber’s rhetoric – for around three months while researching my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I also interviewed my fellow drivers as well as couriers who worked for gig employers such as Deliveroo and CitySprint.

One thing that became strikingly apparent was the vast chasm between the rhetoric espoused by companies and the reality endured by those who worked for them. Despite being categorised as self-employed contractors – and as a consequence losing the right to sick pay, annual leave and the minimum wage – Uber tightly controlled much of what we did on the job. “You can’t pick and choose which jobs you do,” we were told during our induction.

There were even restrictions on the subjects we were allowed to talk about with the passengers in the back of the car. Politics, religion and sport were strictly off-limits. If an Uber driver’s customer service rating fell below 4.7 stars, they would be summoned into Uber’s headquarters for a dressing down and potentially ‘deactivated’ – another euphemism for losing your job.

We were induced to take up the job with Uber on the alluring basis of autonomy. “Always wanted to be your own boss and set your own times? This is your chance!” reads the marketing on Uber’s website. And there were positives about the Uber experience. We had the autonomy to log in and out of the Uber app at a time of our own choosing.

Moreover, the Uber algorithm was less capricious and tyrannical than a human line manager. At the very least, Uber’s algorithm was not going to stop you from earning enough to eat simply because it took a personal disliking to you.

Suggested reading

Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

Uber isn’t the only company operating in the gig economy of course. Callum Cant’s new book, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy documents life as one of the food delivery company’s 15,000 UK couriers. As of 2018, there were around five million self-employed people in the United Kingdom, many of whom work in the booming gig economy.

Cant’s book resembles my own in many ways, not least because the author unflinchingly documents the methods used by gig employers to keep workers impoverished and under tight control and supervision. Making consumers aware of what really goes on when they order a taxi or food is an important task. As Cant writes, the reality of the gig economy is an economic landscape where “the worker takes all the risk”, while the company he or she works for “get all the reward”.

In the case of platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, workers shoulder the cost of doing the job – the car, the petrol, the cost of time taken off through injury or ill health – while the companies themselves avoid the usual burdens associated with having employees. These are passed onto the workers themselves but also to the taxpayer. One Deliveroo courier I interviewed took time off with a ligament injury and ended up signing on for housing benefit because he was not entitled to sick pay.

The biggest difference between my own book and Cant’s, however, is that readers of my book tend to come away depressed after reading it, whereas Cant strikes a more optimistic tone. This is partly a consequence of gig workers making substantial progress in organising themselves (predominantly through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) since I wrote my book back in 2016-17. As Cant writes:

“This is not just a sob story about workers being exploited in bad conditions by bosses who get rich off their work, it’s about how workers have squared up and fought back”.

Indeed, several fashionable shibboleths are demolished very effectively in Cant’s book, from the notion that trade unions are irrelevant to those toiling away in the flexible economy, to the idea that migrant workers can’t be unionised.

Suggested reading

Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

The book focuses predominantly on London and Brighton, where Deliveroo couriers used WhatsApp group chats to organise workers against exploitative piece-work and a local oversupply of labour which was driving down wages. Initially Deliveroo couriers in London protested against collusion between border enforcement agencies and Deliveroo managers, but the dispute quickly escalated as the company made changes to its payment structure. As Cant writes,

“The system would be changed from a flat hourly rate (£7) with a bonus per completed delivery (£1) plus an additional petrol bonus for moped riders, to a fee-per-delivery piece-wage (£3.75) with no hourly rate. If there were no orders, workers would earn no money.”

This prompted a wave of strike action among Deliveroo’s couriers.

Cant does get carried away. “Deliveroo workers have launched a militant struggle for a better world,” he writes. This is true as far as it goes, but Cant seems to define a better world strictly as one in which socialism has triumphed.

This is quite a philosophical jump, not least because contemporary socialism is spectacularly ill-defined, even by its adherents. “Fundamentally, the socialism movement relies on two parts,” Cant writes. “The first is the struggle of the working class against exploitation, and the second is a critique of capitalism and a socialist programme.”

But what is the socialist programme in 2019? For Cant, socialism entails the lofty idea of workers’ democratic control of every workplace. Yet socialism also requires a centralised plan if markets are to be eliminated. Herein lies the fundamental contradiction at socialism’s heart. As I wrote earlier this year for UnHerd:

“you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan, their democratic rights are stripped from them”.

I won’t dwell on this aspect of Cant’s work, because the book contains many important lessons about fighting back against exploitative gig employers. My own book was written to lift the lid on an underreported aspect of working-class life in Britain when gig practices – at least in their current guise – were relatively new.

We’ve moved on since then. We are now at a point where workers whom we were told had no time for trade unions –predominantly migrants and students – are getting organised and fighting back. Anyone who cares about social justice, whether you share Cant’s politics or not, should be cheering them on.

Instead, the Church of England’s interventions over Brexit have been characterised by the kind of mild hysteria and hand-wringing that have, nowadays, become the stock in trade of that institution and its bishops. It seems to me that the Church, within its upper echelons at least, is now less the Tory party at prayer, and more a bunch of Guardian columnists at therapy.

Given that support for Brexit was always a fringe position among senior Anglican clergy, and that those bishops who have pronounced on it have usually done so only to bewail the spread of ‘hate’ and lecture us on how we must protect the poor from the consequences of their own votes, it is perhaps little wonder that those who voted Leave might be suspicious about the Church’s real motives. Thus, Justin Welby’s sermons calling for a rapprochement may resonate favourably in Remain-supporting Hampstead, less so in Leave-supporting Hartlepool.

All of this does, however, throw up the question of what constructive role, if any, our faith institutions might play in drawing together disparate and competing forces at a time of political instability.

Suggested reading

Why does the Left sneer at the traditional working class?

By Paul Embery

Anyone searching for a blueprint could do worse than examine the momentous London dock strike of 1889, and in particular the part played by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, then the 81-year-old Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. This month marks the 130^th anniversary of the conclusion of this most pivotal of industrial struggles – one whose roots lay in the grinding poverty and exploitation that were common features of the Victorian workplace.

Dockers of the age were treated as cattle, and subjected to the humiliating daily ritual of arriving at the dockside and being crammed into holding pens, compelled to jostle their way to the front in the hope of being hired for work. Often they were turned away, and would face the shame of tramping home to face their hungry families, before heading to the docks the next morning to try all over again.

It was an economic system at its most inhuman and degrading, filled with the type of indignity and personal anguish that was captured in that beautiful but heartrending 1948 Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves, in which the protagonist, a poor father, enlists the help of his young son in desperately searching around Rome – a city still ravaged by the effects of war and mass unemployment – for his stolen bicycle, a vital tool of his trade without which he cannot work nor feed his family. Returning desolate at the end of the day, he is unable to summon the courage to enter their home and face his wife, who is inside with their baby.

Suggested reading

Our scandalous disregard for disability

By Ian Birrell

The London dock dispute, born out of a similar deprivation, centred on a demand for the “dockers’ tanner” – a rate of sixpence an hour – and a guaranteed minimum number of working hours. The strikes that were called in pursuit of these goals closed the entire Port of London, as around 100,000 men joined the protest. Solidarity flooded in. The Salvation Army fed the strikers and their families, and Australian waterfront workers sent donations. Jewish tailors in London’s East End, engaged in their own strike against sweatshop conditions, pledged their support to the dockers, and the dockers reciprocated.

For his part, Cardinal Manning, driven by his Catholic faith (he was a convert from Anglicanism), showed himself willing to incur the wrath of his fellow prelates by unashamedly taking up the dockers’ cause and becoming their advocate in negotiations with employers. He saw in the dockers a group of men who were downtrodden and oppressed. Their treatment conflicted with everything he stood for, principally the belief, central to his faith, that all humans were equal in the eyes of the Almighty and deserving of justice and compassion. Nothing about the dockers’ subjugation was pre-ordained as far as Manning was concerned.

He had form. In 1872, he had pledged support to the fledgling Agricultural Labourers’ Union, which landowners and farmers had tried to strangle at birth. And two years prior to the dock strike, he had intervened to prevent a papal condemnation of an early American union, the Knights of Labor.

Suggested reading

What hope for a world without religion?

By Douglas Murray

But in spite of his overt support for the underdog, Manning commanded the respect of both sides in the dock strike and became a trusted mediator. He proved himself adept at reconciling opposing interests without ever sacrificing the support and trust of those with whom his heart really lay.

The dockers won their battle decisively. They got their tanner, and conditions improved. Manning’s portrait was carried by workers alongside that of Karl Marx at subsequent May Day celebrations. The dispute also gave a boost to the New Unionism of the time – a burgeoning of the trade union movement which saw the establishment of a number of unions representing thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who until then had gone unorganised.

Manning’s efforts did not go unnoticed at the Vatican. Less than two years later, a ground-breaking encyclical – Rerum Novarum (Of the New Things) – was issued by Pope Leo XIII. The text, which was said to be influenced in no small part by the London dock strike, addressed the plight of the working-classes, stressing the need for justice in the workplace and warning of the deleterious effects of a predatory and unfettered capitalism.

As a means to countering vast wealth inequality – which he described as the “enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” – Pope Leo gave an explicit endorsement of the virtue of collective bargaining and supported the right to form trade unions. The message was that human beings were not commodities to be exploited by the rich: economic systems should be subordinated to the needs of man, not the other way round, and if they weren’t, then workers were justified in organising to defend their interests.

Suggested reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

With its emphasis on reciprocity, relationships, the common good and the dignity of labour, Rerum Novarum can be seen as one of the foundation stones of modern Catholic social thought. It provided a crucial moral and economic framework for ensuring the representation of the voiceless in the face of a powerful, dehumanising market on the one hand, and an impersonal, over-mighty State on the other. Needless to say, Manning approved. Interpreting it later, he wrote: “A strike is like war. If for just cause a strike is right and inevitable, it is a healthful constraint imposed upon the despotism of capital. It is the only power in the hands of the working men.”

These questions remain as relevant today as they were in Victorian Britain, perhaps more so. In these times of rapacious globalisation, of transient and precarious employment, of the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, of the deracination of entire communities as a consequence of vast and rapid movements of capital and labour, of a widening gap between rich and poor, how might we return to first principles? How might we revisit the belief that respect for the dignity of humanity and labour are integral to the building of a common good, and that economic systems should be configured around the needs of man and – something that those who preach the gospel of liberal markets and liberal cosmopolitanism just don’t understand – his affinity for place and desire for belonging? Crucially, who will speak up for today’s working-class against an establishment that continues to ignore it and treat it with contempt?

In this age of aggressive secularism, do our faith institutions have any role to play at all in this debate? Are they even brave enough to enter into it? Experience tells us that the Roman Catholic church, with its tradition of fighting for social justice and its healthy disdain for fashionable opinion, stands as well-placed as any to do so.

Is it time for Rerum Novarum 2.0?

Justin Welby, the current incumbent of the See, needn’t worry about a similar fate. He has, however, come in for a degree of criticism for his speech to the Trades Union Congress conference, in which he condemned zero-hours contracts and the gig economy as “the return of an ancient evil”, apologised for the Church of England’s historical opposition to the trade union movement, lambasted payday loan companies and Amazon, criticised the tax system, and said that he dreamed of government putting charities such as food banks, night shelters and debt advice clinics out of business.

Some of the criticism was that a religious figure should take any political stance. A more reasonable objection, in my view, was that Welby’s speech was excessively party political – a distinction he himself made during it, though while denying that his position was party political. The third criticism, which came soon after the speech, was that it was hypocritical, since it turned out that the Church of England itself not only employs people on zero-hours contracts, but that the Archbishops’ Council (which Welby chairs) expressly advised that they do so, and that the Church Commissioners, who handle the Church’s finances, own quite a lot of shares in Amazon.

Further reading

Are capitalism and Christianity really compatible?

By Giles Fraser

The first objection is a non-starter. Anyone who thinks that the clergy should stay out of politics, or that religiously-motivated politicians “shouldn’t do God” (as Alastair Campbell advised Tony Blair, arguing that it was a recipe for trouble) is on a hiding to nothing. Religion and politics are both ways in which people attempt to make sense of the world, ensure justice and attempt to correct iniquities. On any reading of the Bible, it is impossible for any Christian, let alone any clergyman, not to scream from any available pulpit for a radical rethinking of the world in which we live.

What is not obvious is a solution provided by the material world, let alone the policies of Jeremy Corbyn in 2018. The direct teachings of Jesus provided by the Gospels are non-existent when it comes to specific instructions on issues that seem to be of high priority to many people who call themselves Christians (homosexuality, birth-control, race, class, redistribution of wealth). They are, however, painfully direct about things which often seem impossible aspirations: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself.

One of the most remarkable things about Jesus –and an indication of the powerfulness of his teachings – is that he was totally obscure for most of his life, and active as a preacher for no more than a year or 18 months. He was sufficiently popular to acquire a following, but sufficently unpopular to be crucified.

Further reading

The Left's shameful silence over the degradation of work

By Jon Cruddas

Yet within a hundred years, Roman writers describe his followers as “dangerous”, and a serious political threat. Not much more than two centuries later, their ideas conquer the known world, and create civilization as the West knows it. A third of the world’s population is nominally Christian, and even secular, liberal, post-religious societies – in other words, most developed countries – have been largely shaped by Christianity.

In historical terms, then, religious power has often been political. Much of European history is the story of clashes between the Church (which usually meant the Roman Catholic Church or the Pope of the day) and national monarchs and governments. The episcopal seat of Canterbury has been a hugely important political power for at least the last thousand years. The Archbishop is not a sort of Anglican Pope, but he is primus inter pares for millions of Christians, and also sits in the House of Lords as a legislator (Welby sat, for example, on the Parliamentary Committee for Banking Standards).

There are plenty of arguments for disestablishing the Church of England, but none for saying that clergy should not take political positions on speak out on political matters. The Archbishop’s position, however, requires a more balanced approach than Welby seems able to take. The criticism of his speech as party political is much more well-founded.

In it, he conflated the teachings of the church with what are more or less the current policies of the Labour Party. This fits in with his previously expressed opposition to, for example, the Government’s Universal Credit policy, caps on benefit and his scepticism about Brexit.

Further reading

Why has secularism got religion in its sights?

By Giles Fraser

The speech expressly referred to capital as something that “reduced human dignity and treated labour as mere resource” and cited John McDonnell, the Labour Shadow Chancellor. In this, he probably resembles the vast majority of Anglican clergy who (unlike the majority of Anglican laity) express a clear preference for the policy solutions of the Left.

Yet, when the conflict between church and state is prompted directly by the teachings of Jesus, it is quite unlike the conflicts between competing political powers. The power of Christianity’s message is that it is a challenge to the material world, and to material power. Much of Christ’s teaching, notably the Sermon on the Mount, demands a literal inversion of norms: the elevation of the poor, the meek, the downtrodden. The Gospels are clear, however, that Jesus actively resisted attempts to characterise his message as political: it transcends politics.

Injunctions against the exploitation of the poor, and that “justice should flow down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream”, are Biblical, political, and very much part of the Archbishop’s business.

What isn’t a similar imperative is the assumption that the ends of the Kingdom of God are identical to the exhortations of the Labour Party, the Guardian’s leader column and the lazy assumption that a caring and just society always requires government intervention, public spending and greater power for the trades unions.

Further reading

The media's sins of omission

By Damian Thompson

It’s hard to see, to take a fairly obvious example, why taking a portion of people’s earning by compulsion, and then redistributing it to the poor through a wasteful and inefficient bureaucracy should be more virtuous than people freely giving their money to the poor. Yet that’s what many now assume – as Welby did in his call for government to put church-run voluntary food banks out of business.

Even those who defend aspects of the tax system and the welfare state ought to recognise that both can become not only a trap for the poor, but a danger to the morals of those who are enjoined by the Church to care for the less-fortunate, by absolving them from their own duties. There are those on the Left, and in the Church, who seem to think that some charitable provision is in itself a disgrace, because it is doing work that ought to be handled by the State. There’s no Christian mandate for a particular political system.

It’s perhaps unlucky, or if you think that way, poetic justice, that Welby should have chosen to start his speech to the TUC with a quotation from the Book of Amos. Because the whole passage which he cited is directed at religious hypocrites. It comes from a section in which the Lord tells the people of Israel that their prayers and sacrifices are in vain if they persist in their “treading upon the poor” and other sins. The almost immediate revelation that the Church employs zero-hours contracts and invests in Amazon, who had been condemned by the Archbishop, were held up as evidence of hypocrisy (which the modern world sees as one of the greatest of all sins).

Further reading

Amazon: the new Victorian workhouse

By James Bloodworth

It’s certainly inconsistent of the Archbishop, but it’s evidence of the limited nature of his alignment of virtuous political behaviour with the priorities of socialism. The economic evidence certainly doesn’t automatically condemn low taxes, flexible working, or reduced government as evils, or leading to oppression. Quite the reverse.

If the Archbishop’s priority is the welfare of low-paid workers, he should perhaps have noted that only 12% of those of zero-hours contracts object to them, and the vast majority actually welcome the chance to work flexibly. He might have spotted that unemployment is at an all-time low.

He could also note that increased globalisation and freedom in markets have led to huge improvements in wealth and well-being and lifted billions out of poverty. In 1820, 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; today, the numbers are almost reversed, with well over 90% not in extreme poverty.

In the past century, free markets have increased the world’s GDP ten-fold, led to global increases in life-expectancy, a reduction in child mortality from more than 50% in the vast majority of countries to less than 5% in all but a few, and all while the population and their standards of living have grown at a phenomenal rate which the Left once insisted was unsustainable.

Further reading

Protestant practice can save capitalism

By Adrian Pabst

The Bible condemns the misapplied love of wealth, and its elevation above the love of God, but it also actively encourages its creation and spread, and the evidence suggests that the best way of overcoming the evils of poverty is not socialism. There are certainly notable remaining inequalities of wealth globally; but they are between countries which have embraced free markets and those which persist in socialist or crony capitalist systems.

The Archbishop’s background is, rather unusually for a clergyman, in business, since he worked as an oil executive until the late 1980s. So it is unlikely that he is altogether unaware of these straightforward economic truths. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp that inequality and poverty are reduced by markets, and that the real examples of exploitation and injustice that he notes are largely the products of attempts to subvert them, either by corporate distortions, government interventions, or discredited socialist economic plans.

He might take a lesson from the remaining Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered, and whom I missed out from the earlier list. In 1381, Simon Sudbury was dragged out of the Tower of London and on nearby Tower Hill had his head hacked off by a mob. His offence was that he had approved of the introduction of more taxes.

I don’t mean right now: not unless you have a particularly traumatic kind of dream. Please don’t move to Kettering on my recommendation and then sue me for the blisters you’ll get, trudging up and down miles of racking in search of obscure consumer goods, a pedometer tracking your every move. Right now, in the baking summer of 2018, this is probably in the top ten worst ways to spend your waking hours.

But I believe it wouldn’t take much to fix those warehouse jobs and make them satisfying, meaningful work.

If you’re one of the people who gets a bit misty eyed about the jobs of the past, how fantastic they were, and how they’ll never be replaced, I can hear you scoffing at the notion that putting stuff in boxes could ever be meaningful. Those who hark back to the pit villages and steel towns that gave working men a sense of pride and identity will tell me that putting stuff in boxes isn’t ‘man’s work’.

Further reading

Work is worth more than a wage

By Henry Olsen

But those people are wrong about where meaning comes from in the workplace. True, some jobs are meaningful because of the direct impact they have in the world – some people save lives, educate children or create works of art. But there’s no such direct meaning in bashing coal off a rock face. Mining is gruelling, physical labour, but if that were enough to create meaning then the warehouse jobs could match it, exhausted limb for exhausted limb.

Perhaps miners spent their days picturing the collective fruits of their labour: families cosy in front of the grate, or factories and power stations whirring into action with coal-fired engines. But if this was what mattered, a warehouse worker could find this kind of meaning too, after all, every package is a story – a child’s new lego, a lawyer’s new folders, a start-up’s new laptops.

So let’s be realistic. No amount of sentimentalising about families using coal or opening boxes could make up for the day-to-day reality of a terrible job. The practical impact of coal in the nation’s life wasn’t the reason that mining jobs were loved by the communities in which they played such a central role.

What do people really miss? It’s pretty simple: a decent wage, sufficiently large and sufficiently predictable to support your family, and a sense of community and belonging, that came as much from the working men’s clubs and the unions as from the mine or the factory itself.

The problems at the bottom end of our labour market are not because the work itself is menial or difficult – they’re because the jobs are structured to exploit, to weaken rather than strengthen community and solidarity. And rather than focusing on how to rectify this, we wallow in a sense of fatalism.

Of course we can take action to regain what has been lost, and even do better than in the past. Nobody really wants back the opportunity to breathe toxic air and be crippled by pneumoconiosis. One advantage of a warehouse is that it isn’t full of coal dust.

Further reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

We often hear that the towns and villages around major distribution hubs hold the jobs offered in these warehouses in contempt and workers have to be bussed in every morning from the cities. This is a huge contrast to the esteem in which the pit or the steel mill would have been held. Those who run these warehouses and factories should be aiming higher, making the jobs they offer worth having, worth keeping, and worth aspiring to. High staff turnover, and rock bottom motivation cannot be good for business in the long run.

We have to start with wages. We need a new approach to the minimum wage, so people are paid extra if they take on unstable jobs, or if they sacrifice employee rights like sick pay and holidays. At the moment the minimum wage creates a huge incentive to shift people off payroll to self-employed or worker status. I’m glad those flexible employment options exist – lots of people love them, and the economic theory suggests they should result in more work being available in total.

But everywhere else in the economy, if you shift risk, you pay a premium to do so. Normally, freelancers earn more per hour than employees because they take all the risk of finding work and covering holidays and periods of sickness – but if you’re only at the minimum wage that doesn’t apply. ‘Self-employed’ workers not receiving these employee benefits should therefore get a higher minimum wage. And people on unpredictable hours, like zero hours contracts, should get extra too, to compensate them for taking on the risk.

It’s just as important that employers support workers’ efforts to organise themselves collectively, to exert their rights and gain influence within the company. It’s a sense of purpose, status and value that brings meaning to a workplace.

If employers are frightened of traditional unions, they should get ahead of them, rather than exhausting their workers so much they don’t have the time or energy to organise. Some gig platforms are now offering access to bespoke insurance or income protection programmes, which is a great start – employers should do the same, or facilitate unions and co-ops that offer this kind of support.

Work is changing, and fast. We can’t go backwards, so instead of dreaming about the past, we should be proactive in securing what’s most valuable in the workplace: purpose and belonging. Proper pay and a lasting community of colleagues are as achievable in the modern workplace as they ever were in the past – that is, if government is willing to regulate and employers to aspire to be something more than the lowest common denominator.

Suggested listening

Audiocast: How dead-end jobs killed small-town pride

By James Bloodworth

Identities here were once strong, tied to work and community. But in recent decades this proud demeanour has been replaced by something closer to humiliation. That’s why the ‘take back control’ rhetoric of the Brexit referendum resounded so powerfully in these parts of the country: the idea of ‘globalisation’ is here synonymous with the destruction of old industry and its replacement with insecure work in warehouses and call centres, much of not even done by the locals.

In order to look more closely at this issue of working-class identity and how it is tied to employment, I returned to the town of Rugeley in the West Midlands where I had previously spent time researching a book on the low pay economy, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. It’s the subject of my new audiodocumentary for UnHerd.

This fairly archetypal, former industrial town is not the poorest place in Britain, but nor is it especially affluent either. The Lea Hall Colliery closed in 1991, and as in many former colliery areas, the old jobs in pits, power stations and factories have been replaced by work in distribution sheds, in call centres and on supermarket checkouts.

Listen to the Rugeley audio cast

Audiocast: How dead-end jobs killed small-town pride

By James Bloodworth

In one sense, this is welcome. More than 100 men[1.  You’ll notice I say “men”: if you were a working-class woman, your place was often at home, ironing shirts or stuck behind a stove] lost their lives at the Lea Hall and neighbouring Brereton collieries during the working life of the two pits. It’s worth remembering this when imagining some long-past golden era which for many was, in fact, dirty, dangerous and oppressive.

There is, however, a palpable sense of loss in Rugeley, and it’s not just a case of residual memories being given a flattering shimmer. The material security of those dangerous old mining jobs has given way to precarity. The largest workplace here today is an Amazon warehouse. When I worked there, all shop-floor staff were employed by agencies on zero-hours, nine-month contracts. “You try getting a mortgage on that!” one of Rugeley’s local councillors remarked to me pointedly. The old colliery may have been dark and dirty, but the money it paid out was at least sufficient to support a family.

Suggested listening

The lesson of l’affaire Huang

By James Bloodworth

We know much of this already. The rise in precarious ‘gig’ work and low-paid, zero-hours contracts is a frequent topic of discussion among policymakers in London. The question of identity, however, tends to receive significantly less attention, presumably because it is a more nebulous concept. But when industry moves out to be replaced by  atomised and insecure work that is devoid of the institutional affiliations of the past it has a profound effect on the collective consciousness.

In Rugeley, as in many other working-class towns, identity – particularly male identity – was at one time  something that was forged by work, something that was shared. However the organisations through which a person could collectively organise have withered on the vine. Trade unions are bereft of members, while social clubs are shells of the institutions that once provided an opportunity for workers to self-educate and self-organise.

It can be difficult to grasp the scale of the change this represents unless you speak to the people that have lived through it. A culture has effectively disappeared. The new jobs lack the solidarity and social networks of the past. Yet the memory of a more cooperative past lingers, compounding the sense of present loss.

When I travelled to South Wales in 2017, I was told almost upon arrival that the old factories which once stood in towns like Ebbw Vale and Brynmawr had been like “extensions of your family”. These work-related networks were once modest outlets of democratic expression, allowing working people to act on the world– as opposed to simply being acted upon. By this I mean that there existed forums of working class democracy through which the individual and the group could interpret wider events – and more importantly, could exert a pressure of their own on their situation. The owner of a pit couldn’t simply cut your wages or lay you off arbitrarily, or else members of the union would walk out on strike. This feels a long way from companies such as Amazon and Sports Direct.

The disappearance of much of this – and the consequent atomisation of social and economic life – has produced a climate propitious to populism. The more chaotic and tumultuous that life appears to be, the easier it is for demagogic politicians to channel the resultant anger toward their own obsessions. The demagogue succeeds by pointing at the processes of globalisation – the forces that close the local factory, or which produce jobs that only Romanian migrants are willing to do – and proposes simple solutions. These are very often ugly, cynical and violent. It seems clear that we are some way down this path already.

More on the rise of populism

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

So why isn’t there more concern in Westminster? When I spoke to Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, for the audiodocumentary, he made the point that the lack of political focus on the chasm between good and bad jobs is partly a result of our growing obsession with futurology. An influential section of the Left is today fixated on a supposedly workless future. Moreover, parts of the Right appear to view automation as a reason not to tackle poor employment practices in the present day. Travelling around the country talking about my book, one of the most common objections I heard went something like this: “Well, aren’t these jobs going to be automated anyway?” In other words, why bother getting worked up about demeaning work when the jobs won’t exist in a few years time?

The potential for a political backlash should squash such glib complacency. At the very least, our politicians could look at how much bargaining power organised labour has in contemporary Britain; we are a long way from the 70s – exploitative employment practices are a more pressing concern in the contemporary economy than militant trade unions. The state might also take a bigger role in regenerating communities where the market has – for whatever reason – decided not to invest.

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To start with, though, we should acknowledge that parts of the country really have been left behind. This requires that we look beyond the headline employment figures and get a real feel for the meaning and sense of identity that many British towns have historically derived from work. Towns like Rugeley are unlikely to meekly accept their lot if ‘progress’ becomes synonymous with a glut of precarious and poorly paid jobs, however much some in Westminster might wish otherwise.

All of us derive some sense of identity from what we do. This is as true in Rugeley as it is in more affluent parts of the country. Until we at least recognise that – and until we listen intently to the people who live or work in such places – our squabbles over the political solutions are largely academic.

One possible culprit is the rise of the so-called ‘gig economy’. In her new book, Gigged: The Gig Economy, the End of the Job and the Future of Work, tech journalist Sarah Kessler uncovers how despite early claims that the flexibility of short-term “gigs” would make workers happier, they bring ‘liberation’ from a traditional safety net, reliable work hours, and even, in many cases, anything close to a livable wage.

While ‘freelancers’ have existed since the invention of money, the ‘gig economy’ kicked off with Uber. The taxi company used AI scheduling and mobile apps to connect passengers to independent drivers. It was distinct from existing freelance marketplaces in its focus on a lower-skill task, and its control over things such as pricing and marketing that, in higher-skill markets, were mostly handled by freelancers themselves.

After Uber truly took off in around 2013, droves of startups mimicked the model – Instacart was the Uber of grocery shopping, Taskrabbit was the Uber of housework.

Kessler has been reporting on the gig economy nearly from the beginning, starting as a blogger for Mashable in 2011, and more recently as an editor at Quartz. When we met recently to discuss the book, she said she was initially encouraged to write it as an immersive first-person narrative – an update of Barbarah Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed in which she would try to live for a year on wages earned through the gig economy.

But she realised that her own background as a well-educated white Midwesterner would make that viewpoint far too narrow. So we get just a few glimpses of Kessler trying her hand at things like the banally authoritarian ‘personality test’ administered to would-be contract housecleaners (“If a $100 bill is laid out on a table without a note, do you take it?”).

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Instead, Kessler focuses on the workers living out the reality of the gig economy’s promise. She spent years following them, and captures them as fascinating, complex figures: an Uber driver who would later agitate for a strike against the company; a Canadian woman who masters the micro-drudgery of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; a computer programmer who tires of the corporate world and goes freelance; and an activist hoping to bring gig opportunities to the rural poor.

Alongside her intimate portraits of these workers’ lives, Kessler picks apart the founding mythology of the gig economy. Companies like Uber consistently emphasise workers’ supposed love of ‘flexibility’, especially to deflect hard questions about pay and fairness. That sort of glad-handing has roots going back at least to the Kelly Girls of the 1950s – temporary office workers who were described by their services as “bored with strictly keeping house.” The was that they didn’t need to be paid or treated well because they were just pampered homebodies, working purely for fun.

That wasn’t true back then – Kessler finds a contemporary study showing that 75% of temp workers in the early 1960s were primarily motivated by a need to earn money. And it’s not true now. While workers today of course value “flexibility” – who doesn’t? – surveys show that all things being equal, they’d rather have a reliable full-time job.

An even broader version of the ‘flexibility’ mantra came from Uber founder, Travis Kalanick. Kalanick (before getting unceremoniously booted from his own company in 2017) was fond of saying that his platform offered “turnkey entrepreneurship”.

“Uber totally sold its job on this idea that it was a path to the American Dream,” Kessler told me. “That it was going to really significantly improve your life status and you’d be running your own business.” That rhetoric, along with tactics like $200 bonuses for drivers who recruited friends to join the platform, helped Uber successfully sign up tens of thousands of drivers around the world.

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One of those drivers was Mamdooh Husein, better known as “Abe,” whose tale is easily the most compelling, weird, and enlightening Kessler tells. We meet Abe as a 28-year-old waiter, whose spartan life in Kansas City makes him long for more. That longing makes him an easy mark for scams including a pyramid scheme called GIN, which promises him wealth and freedom (in exchange for a few small upfront payments). He is badly stung, in an experience that initially makes him sceptical of Uber’s very similar promises – though deep in debt, he eventually signs on.

For Abe and many other gig workers, the promise of ‘entrepreneurship’ is a deceptive one. Like many other drivers, Abe is initially enthusiastic about Uber, but winds up frustrated by falling pay and unexpected expenses. While the company promised that drivers like him could earn up to $90,000 a year, those calculations didn’t include little things like gasoline, car insurance, and maintenance – all of which drivers footed the bill for. For some Uber drivers, expenses can cut income by as much as half.

Describing their workers as ‘entrepreneurs,’ while downplaying the fact that businesses have expenses, seems to have been a conscious strategy by Uber and other gig platforms. The sense that it’s all a long con is even more acute in a handful of cases where startups encouraged workers to buy supplies from the companies themselves. In one case Kessler describes, a cleaning company offered $150 kits full of supplies to contract workers – which it seems unlikely were sold at a loss. Uber for a time offered subprime leasing deals through a subsidiary, and used the app to pitch them to drivers (though in typical fashion, Uber somehow managed to lose money on this company-store scheme).

Just as damning is Kessler’s finding that on-demand technology itself, loudly promoted for making work more flexible and services more nimble, was often used to create employee-like relationships with a veneer of plausible deniability. Instead of human managers giving direct instructions, which would make them more likely to be classified as employees, gig workers are trained by online videos, scheduled by algorithms, and evaluated by ‘star’ ratings issued by customers themselves.

Those star-rating systems have become standard issue not just for gig apps, but for everything from product reviews on Amazon to restaurant directories like Yelp. But the fact that they’re applied to individuals, rather than companies or products, is emblematic of the larger issue here – it helps companies offload risks that come with having employees.

If a worker employed by a company gives sub-par service, they might be fired, but they’re equally likely to get more training or a chance to improve. On gig platforms, workers who get bad ratings can simply be removed from the platform – often, as Kessler describes, with no explanation, warning, or recourse.

The rise of the gig economy, of course, happened in a broader context that made workers ripe for such exploitation. When Uber arrived, unemployment in the US was still over 7%. At the same time, the recession set off sustained cuts to American education at all levels – cuts which hit the most marginalised communities hardest.

That educational gap is clear in the story of Terrence Davenport. Kessler highlights Davenport’s years-long effort, with help from a well-meaning nonprofit, to connect his poor, rural Arkansas hometown, through the internet, to the gig economy. For most remote work – research, data entry, and customer service – Davenport’s students wind up competing with workers abroad who can afford to charge much less for the same work.

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At the same time, few of the programme participants have even the basic education for online jobs, such as social media management, that require strong language skills. After several years of heartbreaking struggle in which very few participants found even temporary work, the programme was shut down.

Abe eventually came to regard Uber as yet another scam, and started a campaign to pressure the company to improve its treatment of drivers. At the time, some news outlets reported the action as an inspiring blow struck for the little guy, but Kessler’s thorough reporting reveals it as something more complicated. The small strikes Abe organises have essentially no effect, so he – as Kessler finds out through an email he shows her – offers Uber a deal: for a payment of $10,000, he’ll stop organising.

Uber doesn’t bite, but Kessler is rightly troubled by this willingness to trade collective power for personal gain. In her effort to understand it, she concludes Abe “had felt powerless for most of his life” and violently resented that feeling. But he had few models for change aside from self-help scammers – and a bit later, President Donald Trump.

By the end of Gigged, Kessler tells us that Abe has managed to put together the down payment on a rental property. An American optimist to the core, he thinks this will inevitably lead to a future career as a real estate tycoon, making him enthusiastic about Trump’s (since-fulfilled) plans to cut taxes and regulations on the corporations and the wealthy. “When you’re rich,” Abe told Kessler, “You can do things nobody else can do. You’re truly free.”

Abe’s story suggests the gig economy is deeply implicated not just in inequality, but in a disturbing subtext of supposedly ‘populist’ Trumpist ideology. The broad shift away from employment and towards relationships in which workers are treated as second-class citizens drives home the idea that being rich is the only security. It also teaches the lesson that being entirely self-centered – exploiting the weak, blackmailing the strong, and devil take your fellow man – is a great way to get there.

The nature of the platforms reinforces this antisocial spirit, to the benefit of the gig companies. Workers don’t interact in a workplace, and can’t communicate with or even identify one another through the platforms, making organising for change much more difficult. Even skilled workers aren’t immune – Kessler reports on emerging AI systems that can coordinate teams of freelancers to complete complex projects, such as long business documents, without direct human supervision. That could expand companies’ protection from employment lawsuits, applying the same kinds of pressure to high-skilled workers that are already faced by drivers, cleaners, and couriers.

How do we reverse those trends? Technology can be turned to better ends. Platforms similar to Uber, but built without profit in mind, could form the basis for a new kind of worker cooperative, preserving gig flexibility while ensuring fairer pay (and likely leveraging that as a selling point).

Another bright spot Kessler finds is that there is actually a profit motive for some companies to provide good jobs that don’t require college degrees. That’s particularly true of those, like Starbucks and Costco, that emphasise high-quality service, and want to avoid high turnover and training costs. For consumers interested in voting with their dollars, she suggests using licensed taxis, or hiring a housecleaner directly instead of through an app.

But the logic of the market alone won’t restore worker dignity, or mass faith in responsible leadership. European and UK  legislators have increasingly shown a willingness to reinforce traditional labour relationships, but there’s much less stomach for it in in America.

Some states have pushed for more worker-friendly rules, but others, including Texas, have actually prevented cities from regulating gig platforms. Rather than making Uber more like a regular job, though, Kessler argues that laws need to adjust to the new reality of flexible labour – for the US, she suggests that portable benefits and more fine-grained employment categories might help, though she acknowledges those have their own issues. She also touches on more radical proposals like Universal Basic Income, a streamlined welfare system beloved of Silicon Valley itself.

Kessler’s book makes it more clear than ever that some solution to the fragmenting of traditional employment is direly needed.  That the shortcomings of flexible labour have become so clear, at a moment when the US is so politically ill-prepared to act, may yet prove a tragedy of historic proportions.

Uber never seems to be out of the courts. In America, eleven cases are currently sitting with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. In the UK, the ride-hailing company looks set for a trip to the Supreme Court in its fight against a tribunal ruling that its drivers should be classified as workers.

The plight of gig workers has become the cause celebre of workers’ rights. Greedy gig platforms are condemned as the modern-day equivalent of the exploitative factory owners of the industrial revolution. Sick pay? The minimum wage? Bargaining rights? Not for the ‘gigger’. Instead there’s flexibility and control – which, the companies argue – is why people sign up.

The CitySprint case was brought by a single employee, but as with those against Uber, the implications are sector-wide. As this model matures, the relevant companies will need to make changes. The greater concern should be the spread of gig-style labour models to non-gig work – and we’re already seeing that happen.

The gig economy works for the many

Companies arguing that workers want flexibility are not wrong:

• Detailed research by the RSA think tank found that more than half of UK gig workers viewed the work positively, citing advantages like flexibility or decent pay; and 63% of current workers agreed that it allowed them to have more “control and freedom over when they work”.[2. Brhmie Balaram, Josie Warden and Fabian Wallace-Stephens, ‘Good Gigs. A fairer future for the UK’s gig economy’, RSA, April 2017]
• A McKinsey report looking at America and Europe found that the majority of gig workers are independent contractors by choice.[3. .‘Independent work. Choice, necessity and the gig economy’, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2016] They also found that for every worker whose primary earnings are from contracting, but would prefer a traditional job, more than two traditional workers would like to become independent contractors.

The controversy engulfing the gig model risks undermining what makes gig work so attractive to so many.

And it risks ignoring the broader benefits that disruptive app-based companies such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Handy are delivering – making services cheaper and more accessible for consumers; directly connecting service providers with their market, in real time; and lowering the barriers to entry for people seeking employment, particularly for young people.

The benefits of removing the middleman shouldn’t be underestimated. There are now gig platforms for social care workers, supply teachers and health workers, cutting out the agency fees and paying higher wages. These are people who are better off because of the advent of gig platforms.

This is not to say that greater protections for workers are unwarranted. While a majority of gig workers are actively choosing that model of work – often supplementing other sources of income – a good chunk, estimated at just over a quarter in the UK and US, do so out of necessity. That is, they can’t find sufficient ‘regularised’ work elsewhere.

And while many gig platforms have developed in sectors that were already heavily skewed towards self-employment (something critics conveniently forget), that doesn’t mean action shouldn’t be taken to raise standards – particularly when more and more people are working in this way. Plus, strictly speaking, there is a difference between being self-employed, running your own enterprise, and being an independent contractor working for a single company.

A review of “good work”, commissioned by the UK government and triggered by concerns about working conditions in the burgeoning gig economy, argues the onus should be on the companies:[4. .‘Good work: the Taylor review of modern working practices’, 11 July 2017]

“The best way to achieve better work is not national regulation but responsible corporate governance, good management and strong employment relations within the organisation, which is why it is important that companies are seen to take good work seriously and are open about their practices and that all workers are able to be engaged and heard.”

The RSA recommend a ‘Charter for Good Work in the Gig Economy’, a collaboration between government, companies and representative bodies to agree a set of standards that value workers.[5. Brhmie Balaram, Josie Warden and Fabian Wallace-Stephens, ‘Good Gigs. A fairer future for the UK’s gig economy’, RSA, April 2017] As the gig economy grows, putting more traditional employee-based firms out of business, and disrupting new industries, it’s right that businesses take seriously the economic and social security of their workers – contractors or not. A Charter would be a good place to start.

The greatest challenge, however, is the threat of the gig model being bastardised by unscrupulous businesses looking to increase profits at the expense of their workers. As a joint report by two UK parliamentary committees this week put it: “willingness to exploit workers should not be a competitive advantage”.[6. .A framework for modern employment, Second Report of the Work and Pensions Committee and First Report of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee of Session 2017–19, 15 November 2017]

It’s called the gig economy for a reason – workers get paid for discrete ‘gigs’, like hanging a picture, developing an app, cleaning a flat; and they perform multiple gigs for multiple clients. That’s why it’s a form of self-employment. And why self-employment and employment are treated differently. Blurring those lines to cut costs is a cynical move that makes a mockery of the age-old ‘social contract’ between business, workers and the state.

We can already see it happening.

Take budget airline Ryanair for example, recently in the news for cancelling thousands of flights. Ryanair uses ‘self-employed’ pilots, thereby enabling them to avoid employee-related taxes and benefits.

Writing in The New York Times Liz Alderman and Amie Tsang report on conditions at Ryanair similar to those experienced by gig workers at companies such as Uber and Deliveroo: pilots and crew say they only get paid for flight time, not preparation; their hours are not guaranteed; and they have to cover their own, unavoidable, expenses such as hotels and transport, even their own uniforms.[7. Liz Alderman and Amie Tsang, ‘Jet Pilot Might Not Seem Like a ‘Gig,’ but at Ryanair, It Is’, The New York Times, 16 November 2017]

Unlike genuine gig workers, however, Ryanair pilots are not undertaking ‘gigs’. They work for one company, on that company’s schedule – how is that different from an employee? If the trade made by self-employed people is flexibility and control in exchange for fewer benefits, Ryanair pilots are getting all of the downside and none of the upside.

What happens when Ryanair is no longer an outlier but the norm? That’s not so difficult to imagine. The rise of the actual gig economy has been swift, and we didn’t see it coming.

Management consultancy firms could decide to make their consultants contractors, and their HQs the ‘platform’ for allocating labour. Major retailers could start allocating shifts as ‘gig’ work – the next step from zero hour contracts? A major hotel chain could start getting housekeeping or reception services on a flexible, as-needed basis. Or a factory starts contracting assembly line workers according to the ebb and flow of orders.

That’s a level of disruption no economy or society is prepared for, and one that requires an entirely new approach to tax and social security.

The two UK parliamentary committees warning of the risks of exploitative behaviour have gone so far as to draft legislation which, if enacted, would introduce “a new presumption of ‘worker by default’”, that “would require companies to provide basic safety net standards of rights and benefits to their workers—or prove that their working practices are genuinely reflecting of self-employment.”[8. .‘Committees publish bill to end exploitation’, Work and Pensions and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committees, 20 November 2017]

Such a measure will undoubtedly raise the heckles of businesses and their trade body cheerleaders. They will call it heavy-handed; burdensome regulation that stifles innovation. But if employers continue pushing at the limits of what society deems fair and decent, if they rip up the social contract, then they shouldn’t be surprised when society pushes back.