The New Roaring Twenties by Paul Zane Pilzer

The New Roaring Twenties by Paul Zane Pilzer

Author:Paul Zane Pilzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637740989
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2023-01-23T00:00:00+00:00


WHAT’S SO NEW ABOUT THE GIG ECONOMY?

Growing up in New York City as the son of an immigrant, I never knew there was anything except the gig economy, which, to me back then, meant getting paid only for work you completed rather than an hourly or monthly salary. From 1919 through 1977, my father and his brothers had a family business making bedspreads with most of the employees paid for “piecework,” which is just what it sounds like. Each employee had a specific title—like cutter, sewer, folder, bagger, packer—which described what they did. Employees were paid for each item they worked on, e.g., twenty-five cents for sewing a pillow cover, or eight dollars for cutting one hundred yards of fabric into bedspread pieces, and so on. Sometimes these would be a guaranteed daily minimum stipend in case we didn’t have enough work for a specific employee. Everyone worked every day in the same factory, which was open six days a week from 6:00 AM until 5 PM. When I worked for my father on weekends and during the summers, it would have been unthinkable for me to ask to be paid for anything except what I had actually produced on the floor of the factory.

The gig economy as we know it today is much more advanced than my family business, starting with its sheer size. More than one-third of US workers (36 percent of the employed) or fifty-nine million people now participate. It took off during the Great Recession between 2007–2009, when tens of millions of people lost their regular jobs and needed to find work—anywhere at any price—since the government back then did not provide the trillions of dollars in stimulus payments.

Thus, when I first heard the term “gig economy” during the Great Recession in the late 2000s, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about—the gig economy seemed to merely describe the business world that was all around me growing up. I soon learned there was more to the gig economy than just paying employees for piecework, but even today there is no universal definition because this pillar of our economy is so new.

CONSTRUCTION: ANOTHER PREDECESSOR OF THE GIG ECONOMY

I experienced a predecessor of the gig economy in the 1970s when I was involved part-time in building and renovating luxury beach houses in Westhampton, New York, often one at a time. Some days we’d need workers who were skilled in digging and pouring a foundation, then some days we’d need carpenters to frame a building, then some days we needed workers skilled at electrical or plumbing, and so on.

Occasionally, just past dawn, I’d accompany my general contractor, Ed Turner, to the local Home Depot parking lot in Riverhead, New York, twenty miles away. I’d watch him interview crew managers, speaking with them in Spanish, until he found the specific teams we needed that day, which would be different than the teams we had hired the day before or would need in a few more days. While such



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