Hustle and Gig by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

Author:Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520300552
Publisher: University of California Press

Although the workplace protections dealing with safety and the right to unionize date back to the early industrial age and the beginning of the 1900s, American protections against sexual harassment are a direct outcropping of second-wave feminism. Some sharing economy supporters suggest that workplace protections are no longer needed—that the laws are outdated or no longer relevant—but even the newer workplace protections are no match for the sharing economy’s bulldozing of workplace protections.

This economic movement forward into the past results in an undercutting of sexual harassment workplace protections. Not only is the issue of sexual harassment rarely touched on by the sharing economy companies, but also workers don’t expect to have workplace protections. Behavior that would be unacceptable in a corporate office is ignored or explained away as “weird” when it occurs in an employer’s bedroom or kitchen or when the work is allegedly focused on the egalitarianism of peer-to-peer connections. Instead of feeling free to identify this treatment as sexual harassment, workers who find themselves sexually approached by clients struggle to describe what exactly is going on, using terms like bizarro-land to demonstrate a sense of confusion and discomfort.

Sexual harassment is hardly the only illegal activity occurring in the gig economy. Workers sometimes find that their day’s work includes a “dirty” element, since the anonymous nature of the gig economy enables the outsourcing of drug deliveries and scams to otherwise law-abiding workers. The gig economy upends our assumptions about work as an alternative to crime by turning workers into criminal accomplices who are hired for illegal or legally questionable activities. As the sharing economy rolls back worker protections, it also creates new opportunities for criminal enterprise.

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