The gig economy is quietly undermining a century of worker protections

Although workplace protections still exist for full-time and part-time employees, gig workers as independent contractors, are outside the social safety net of basic workplace protections. Ravenelle also speaks to founders who either switched from hiring contractors to employing workers, like the New York cleaning service MyClean, or decided doing so was the right thing to begin with, like the Hello Alfred errand-running service in Manhattan, which attempts to anticipate customer needs and therefore relies on a relationship between workers and consumers. As Ravenelle notes, the “gig economy” is profoundly disrupting the deal between workers and businesses in the US, increasing economic insecurity and worker vulnerability and incentivizing investors and businesses to be bad social actors.

Source: qz.com