Some people actually believe that those participating in the Gig Economy, that Libertarian wet dream, are mostly entrepreneurial souls gladly Ubering others just until they secure seed money for their startup. That’s preposterous.

Piecework employment isn’t good at all for Labor unless basic income in uncoupled from work, which isn’t the arrangement most citizens find themselves in. And if wages remain flat and too many people are reduced to rabbits with tasks but no benefits, we’re in a collective quandary.

Andrew Callaway has penned a Policy Alternatives article about his perplexing experiences in the so-called Sharing Economy. The writer ultimately doesn’t feel that such an arrangement is bad for everyone, but that most will not prosper within its new rules. The opening:

If you spend enough time in San Francisco, you’ll notice sharing economy workers everywhere. While you’re waiting to get some food, look for the most frantic person in the lineup and you can bet they’re working with an app. Some of them are colour-coded: workers in orange T-shirts are with Caviar, a food delivery app; those in green represent Instacart, an app for delivering groceries. The blue jackets riding Razor scooters are with Luxe—if you’re still driving yourself around this city, these app workers will park your car. 

In the Bay Area, there are thousands of such people running through the aisles, fidgeting in line and racing against the clock. They spend most of their time in cars, where it can be harder to spot them. Oftentimes they’re double-parked in the bike lane, picking up a burrito from inside an adjacent restaurant or waiting for a passenger to come down from the apartment on top. If you look closely, you’ll see a placard in the window that says Uber or a glowing pink moustache indicating they drive around Lyft’s passengers. Last summer, I was one of them.

Oh, Canada! I’m writing you from Berkeley, California to warn you about this thing called “the sharing economy.” Since no one is really sharing anything, many of us prefer the term “the exploitation economy,” but due to its prevalence many in the Bay Area simply think of it as “the economy.”•