On the Brink of the Next Industrial Revolution, The Gig Economy Promises a Fairer Playing Field

In the prior Industrial Revolution, workers both won and lost. Economists Nicholas Crafts and Terence Mills calculated that the real wages of British workers more than doubled between 1840 and 1910. At the same time, unsafe conditions, child labor, and brutally long workweeks became a way of life for the working class.

There is, however, more to this story. In both Britain and the United States, wages continued their upward trajectory throughout much of the twentieth century; child labor and inhumane working conditions did not.

Had the Industrial Revolution never happened, the labor right movement never would have, either. Workers organized and fought for their rights, extending a golden age of capital to labor as well. As productivity grew — as corporations earned greater returns on their invested capital — so, too, did workers’ wages.

In recent decades, however, productivity and wages have diverged. Although economists have proposed different explanations, the clear contributor is technological change.

Once upon a time, the only way to increase productivity was to add a worker. No longer is this the case, producing downward pressure on wages. U.S. manufacturing output, for example, is greater than ever despite the sector employing 8 million fewer people than it did in the 1970s. Real wages in manufacturing, meanwhile, have steadily declined.

Outside of manufacturing, these trends are even more stark. In the U.S. software industry, which is growing at triple the rate of the broader economy, productivity is even less hitched to jobs and wages. When Instagram sold to Facebook in 2012, for example, it was a billion-dollar company with just 13 employees.

These trends point to a truth that workers and executives already realize: In the internet age, the traditional employment model is no longer the most efficient way of organizing either labor or capital. But can the gig economy produce a better distribution?

Labor activists have been among the loudest opponents of the gig economy. They point to Uber and other high-profile employers of contingent workers, decrying a dismantling of 20th-century labor protections and benefits guaranteed to most full-time workers.

The common thread of all these arguments is that they place upon the corporation roles other than merely organizing workers toward a shared goal. Opponents point out, for example, that employer-provided healthcare is essentially unheard of in the gig economy.

They forget, however, that employer-paid healthcare isn’t inherent to full-time work, either. It’s actually something of a historical accident in which post-war employers began offering health insurance as a benefit in order to woo skilled workers.

Forget these riders of full-time employment, and the gig model begins to look more appealing for workers. At its heart, the gig economy enables companies to buy only the skills they need and in the amount required.

This benefits employers, of course, but think about what it means for workers. Because they’re selling only their most valuable skills, workers can command higher per-hour pay than in the traditional model. The result is a more efficient labor model in which workers are more responsible for the fruits of their labor and companies can pay more knowing they are buying only what they need.

Understandably, some worry that this pre-industrial way of paying people — purchasing a one-time work product rather than renting an individual’s skills for an undefined period — could exacerbate inequality. But a 2010 study published in The Economic Journal concluded that “both the dispersion and the mean of inequality statistics across countries, at pre-industrial times and today, are similar.”

The study went on to argue, interestingly, that even as inequality increases in growing economies, the extraction ratio — essentially, the proportion of excess capital siphoned by plutocrats before being dispersed across the society — can fall. But in declining economies, greater inequality is almost always correlated with a greater extraction ratio. In other words, the authors argue, economic growth is the key to ensuring capital reaches everyday people.

It’s too early to tell whether the gig economy will grow the economy in a long-term sense. But there is ample data showing that the economy is growing in the direction of gig work.

In 2016, Harvard and Princeton economists found that 94 percent of net job growth since 2005 was in the “alternative work” sector — the gig economy. Essentially all the 10 million jobs created during that period were not typical 9-to-5 jobs.

The unvarnished truth is that inequality continues to worsen across the U.S. while traditional job growth has been anemic at best. The gig economy, on the other hand, is flourishing; encouraging it may be our best chance to curtail inequality.

Growing the gig economy might be the last thing labor activists want. But just as the Industrial Revolution was trailed by a revolution in worker’s benefits, so ought this one.