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2 pages/≈550 words
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APA
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Literature & Language
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Essay
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English (U.S.)
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Low Wage Work and the Gig Economy. Literature & Language Essay

Essay Instructions:

For Monday, March 30th, you have an assignment that will count for 3.0 points of your course grade.
Your job is to read and view the following:
Poor worker conditions power gig economy (Links to an external site.)
NY Times: Is Gig Work a Job? (Links to an external site.)
Wash Post: Gig economy workers work through the coronavirus. They have no choice. (Links to an external site.)
PBS: The Internets Hidden Science Factory (Links to an external site.)
I was an undercover Uber driver (Links to an external site.)
Optional Reading (strongly encouraged but not necessary to include in your summary):
Undercover Driver: I Made $9 Per Hour (Links to an external site.)Sarah Kessler: GiggedPreview the document
Then write a 300 word summary and answer the following discussion questions:
The Gig Economy
Based on the readings and your own experience, does the Gig Economy represent a new way of organizing work?
How do workers/independent contractors engage gig employment? What are their expectations? Do they see the work as full time employment, part-time employment or just side-money to grab when they need it? How do companies like Uber, Lyft, and Amazon Turk “sell” the jobs?
Do service providers such as Amazon Turk, Uber and Lyft do more than provide a service? Are they in fact employers masquerading as “matchmakers?”
Looking to the future, what do you think? Will more employers embrace the model or will they decide that hiring workers as employees is the better way, or best way, to organize work and turn a profit?
And what about workers? We’ve already learned that the Better Business Climate (BBC) has eroded the social safety net and the Gig Economy would seem to put even more pressure and responsibility on workers to pay their own way (e.g., unemployment, retirement, health care, insurance, taxes, workers comp. etc.) And given the COVID-19 world we are all living through, should we be thinking in terms of rebuilding our social safety net to meet the new demands or should we continue thinking in BBC terms where there will be less government, less regulation and we let workers compete in a free wheeling, free market economy?
You can cut and past your summary and questions on to a Word Doc or whatever word processing app you use. If you don't use Word, please be sure to save your assignment as a PDF before you upload it. You can also download the Questions here: Week 9 Discussion QuestionsPreview the document

Essay Sample Content Preview:

The Gig Economy
Name
Institutional Affiliation
The Gig Economy
The essay begins with the summary of a video and articles about the Gig Economy. To begin with, Poor worker conditions power gig economy is a video describing how the contemporary lifestyle has been taken to the next level. With a tap of a button on our smartphones, apps enable us to summon services like hiring taxis to our locations (Financial Times, 2016). However, a researcher known as Izabella Kaminska reveals that poor working conditions only power these apps.
The second article, ‘Is Gig Work a Job?’ describes how Uber and Lyft argue about their drivers. The two companies are that their drivers are not employees; instead, they are contractors since they have given them the freedom to choose duration they can work, when, and places of their choice. Third, Wash Post, ‘Gig economy workers work through the coronavirus. They have no choice,’ discusses effects of Coronavirus on gig workers. The pandemic has paralyzed the whole world. People are being advised to maintain social distance, work from home, avoided crowds, and stay home among other advises given by the WHO. These pieces of advice have made people entirely depend on deliveries services. However, the article argues that people making the deliveries are at the risk of exposure to the virus and may spread it. Uber and Lyft drivers, for example, won't stay at home even if they feel unwell since the companies do not employ them; instead, they are just contractors.
In the fourth article, ‘The Internets Hidden Science Factory,’ we meet Sarah Marshall, a survey-talker for the past five years. She has done over 20000 academic surveys, and now she is used to them. Currently, Marshall is working for Amazon' Mechanical Turk. However, she realizes that the work is tedious as she keeps on doing the same things over and over (Marder & Fritz, 2015).
‘I was an undercover Uber driver,’ is our fifth article. Guendelsberger discusses various issues in this article. She says that Uber and her close competitor, known as Lyft, are illegal taxi services that have not been registered or licensed by the government. She also says that the Uber and Lyft cabs are just privately owned vehicles that are uninspected and do not guarantee customers a clean and safe delivery. Last but not least is ‘Undercov...
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