Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work

Reporter Kessler delivers a stark, skimpy look at the future of work. She begins by describing how, when she graduated from college, in the middle of the 2008 recession, there were few full-time jobs to be had, and increasingly more part-time, “contingent” jobs. She goes on to examine both sides of the gig economy: the one creating opportunity, and the one increasing insecurity and risk. Business leaders quoted here, including Stan Chia of Grubhub and Carole Woodhead of Hermès UK, identify flexibility as a primary benefit of this kind of work, whether it’s driving a car for Uber or prowling for short-term tasks on Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourced task marketplace. Contrary to Silicon Valley’s optimism, the gig economy is not a net positive, argues Kessler, particularly for low-wage workers like the house cleaner she describes commuting two hours to earn $10 an hour. Restructuring the way people work is a good idea, the author writes, but it’s also necessary to fix the support structures underlying the economy. Kessler concludes that the U.S. needs another labor movement, another New Deal, or similar revolutionary idea to accompany such a radical change, while warning it took decades for legislators to address the comparable disruptions brought by the Industrial Revolution. This is a brief study stretched to book length; good points are made, but on the whole it feels light. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, McCormick Literary (June)