It is predicted to shift more risk onto individuals and communities. The future is predicted to be less job-centric. Meanwhile many participants in the hustle economy have had to adapt quickly to the new context created by the coronavirus. Since March, tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment. By the 2000s, this approach was taken for granted. The trajectory from economic opportunity to block grants is an allegory for how the dominant economic logic in the United States shifted from an emphasis on civil rights to “investment.” By the 1980s, “economic opportunity” meant promoting entrepreneurship and securing formal credentials among poor people and minorities. The legislation, which included funding for a jobs program, adult education, and small business loans, was eventually replaced by the Community Services Block Grant in 1981. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which introduced the term into public provisioning, was part of the massive investment in social welfare that happened in the middle of the twentieth century. Today, inequality-especially racial inequality-is not only produced through the job market but through people’s ability to hustle. While all of these types of hustling can happen in conjunction with waged employment and other forms of entrepreneurship, they all show how the assumption of risk has shifted from states and employers to workers. Hustling also refers to influencers, who develop personal brands on social media platforms and exchange their share of market capture in the attention economy for discounted products, free goods, and direct-to-consumer sales. So are independent contractors who enter arrangements with companies (like Uber, Lyft, or Amazon with its delivery drivers) that provide access to proprietary scheduling-based work in exchange for workers who will accept the risk of not being an employee. “Platform entrepreneurs” who trade their labor using a digital platform (like TaskRabbit or Takl) that extracts a portion of that labor in exchange for facilitating payments and promotion between provider and customer are hustling. It has also become synonymous with a type of job-adjacent work that looks like it is embedded in the formal economy but is governed by different state protections, which makes the work risky and those doing it vulnerable. Hustling traditionally refers to income-generating activities that occur in the informal economy. In lay terms, economic opportunity in the future of work looks like hustling. When I was recently asked to consider how digital technologies shape “economic opportunity” and the “future of work,” I started by examining what we mean by economic opportunity, and what counts as work. Tech utopianism disembeds the future from the political economies that produce its social relations, and it obscures the machinations of racial capitalism. The futurism of technology discourse is ahistorical and ideological. Is an Uber driver an entrepreneur, a worker, or a vendor? The answer appears to be whatever Uber needs her to be.
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