Gigged by Sarah Kessler

 

I am once again plagued by books with important stories to tell. Late-stage capitalism has let loose a torrent of books by journalists and political commentators that focus on storytelling as an answer to suffering. The books center the authors as observers in individual people's tragic stories while contextualizing them with statistics and studies of the broader crises. Don't call it Gonzo Journalism, these authors aren't the main character even if they represent a real presence. They're more like hyper-knowledgeable observers, they're storytellers, disciples, Uatu; this is Gonzeaux Journalism. 

I've read a number of these. Evicted by MatthewDesmond is about individuals caught up in the housing crisis, Our Kids* and TheShort and Tragic Life of Robert Peace are about inequality. Others, I have only heard about; The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Nickel and Dimed, Waiting for Superman, Fast Food Nation etc etc. In all of these (and more) the author inserts themselves as the arbiter of the tragic types of stories capitalism breeds, but their role sort of stops there. It's as though simply communicating the real trauma of the lives of their subjects will be enough to rally their readers to end the plight (although in each the call to action doesn't seem to extend beyond "think about it!").

I can now add Sarah Kessler's Gigged to the growing list. Along with Evicted, it's probably the best demonstration of why I'm so frustrated with this genre of book. The individual stories of those affected by capitalism are incredibly important and powerful, but if there is no radical vision or assessment for the improved condition of the subject (to say nothing of a call-to-action), what importance and power is there becomes greatly diminished. 

Rather than discuss each of the subjects in Kessler's work, it's important to assess what end she is using them for. For example, Curtis is a technically gifted, socially aloof programmer who couldn't stand the mundanity of his 9-5 tech job; so, he quits and joins an army of gig workers doing programming work on his own time. Kessler presents Curtis' story as an ideal; this is the future of work the gig economy promised. His addition is no doubt to add a level of complication to the narrative, as though to say "we can't get rid of the gig economy! Look how it works for people like Curtis!". 

This sort of thing drives me fucking nuts and it is a prevalent theme in Gigged. The one gig economy exec story is that of Dan Teran, CEO and founder of Managed by Q. MbQ is a cleaning company attempting to bring the Uber-style, app-based contingent workforce management to office cleaning. When the idea falls apart because the company didn't have the management skills to match the enormous amount of startup capital it received (another issue in the gig economy world that I feel like Kessler barely addresses), Teran and co take a different tract. They decide to be a "good employer", a company that attracts top tier cleaning talent by offering higher wages and other benefits. Go figure, the age-old "pay people more" strategy pays off. The inclusion of MbQ seems to suggest that in order to fix the issues in Gigged is if a number of companies decide to become "good".  

The problem in all of this is that there is actually a lot of room in capitalist eco-systems for "good employers" and exploitation to co-exist symbiotically. The only time I was exposed to the concept was in Nicole Ashoff's book The New Prophets of Capital. The idea is that, not only do "good" capitalists and employers lay cover fire for bad ones - where they represent the golden child we can consistently point to - they actually rely on systems of exploitation inherent to capitalism. 

One of these is the concept of monopsony. An easy way to think of this is to think about a bunch of small or midsize coffee shops that pay their baristas a bad wage. Then you have a much larger coffee chain open up that pays slightly higher, even gives benefits. What that large coffee shop is doing is controlling the labor market by becoming monopsonistic. You're not going to quit and go work at the shittier coffee shops, you're going to have a hard time unionizing or demanding more workplace freedom etc. We don't have to think that hard this is what Starbucks and a whole host of other sector companies do. Not every employer could be a "good" employer or the system would empower workers who could simply go to a competitor if they didn't like their working conditions or couldn't organize etc. 

So what Kessler is doing, whether intentional or not, is presenting people like Curtis as an obstacle in preventing the sorts of exploitation that happens to other people she profiles, like Kristy who worked for the online, Amazon funded Mechanical Turk or Terrance who got caught up in the pyramid scheme reeking Samaschool. She'll write scathingly of some of Uber's lobbying efforts but then neglect to make the connection that some of these gig companies that "work", companies like Managed by Q, exist exactly because they can ride the coat tales of those exact lobbying efforts. What is emphatically missing from the whole of Gigged is a radical reassessment of the entire system.

The conclusion of Gigged is also outright dastardly. Because Kessler has believed she's simply peeled back the curtain on a complicated phenomenon, she too believes that the solution is some complicated mixture we haven't quite found the recipe for at the center of everything. To do so, she reimagines the tumultuous history of the industrial revolution as a sort of parallel for today: 

"It took another half century or so for the labor movement**, in partnership with government and private industry, to form things like a standard ten-hour day, state laws regulating child labor, and requirements for worker safety".

This view suggests the exploitation of the time were almost accidental; just an inevitable hiccup when developing complex manufacturing systems rather than inherent and intentionally developed features of the systems themselves. This also suggests these problems were overcome through out of the box, administrative problem solving as opposed to the violent struggle the government, labor, and private industry engaged in. Here is historian Howard Zinn talking about one such....uh...partnership... in Ludlow: 

"This was the Colorado coal strike that began in September 1913 and culminated in the “Ludlow Massacre” of April 1914. Eleven thousand miners in southern Colorado … worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies. …

When the strike began, the miners were immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and carried on the strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies.

The gunmen hired by the Rockefeller interests—the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—using Gatling guns and rifles, raided the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they hung on, drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out strikebreakers. With the miners resisting, refusing to give in, the mines not able to operate, the Colorado governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as ‘our little cowboy governor’) called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers supplying the Guard’s wages.

The miners at first thought the Guard was sent to protect them, and greeted its arrival with flags and cheers. They soon found out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought strikebreakers in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat miners, arrested them by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades of women in the streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And still the miners refused to give in. When they lasted through the cold winter of 1913-1914, it became clear that extraordinary measures would be needed to break the strike."

 

Storytelling is important, but if we're going to use it to make a broader point about the unacceptability of things like entrenched poverty or rampant inequality, we need to be as Michael Brooks once said; "kind to people and ruthless to systems".  A great example of storytelling paired with a radical vision is Tim Faust's Health Justice Now. Faust uses first-hand stories about people caught up in the egregious American healthcare system. Many of these stories are heartbreaking, but Faust uses them to portray the unacceptability of the world we live in. He then brilliantly articulates a world in which we remove the profit motive driving a lot of the issues explored in the book. Faust discusses single-payer healthcare and an eventual move to not-for-profit pharma companies and he has a clear call to action on how to get there; activism, class struggle etc. 

Gigged does have an important story to tell. Kessler has been writing about this for a long time and the ascendancy of the gig economy will have ramifications for a long time. It's an important read, but it's equally important to be critical of anything that seems so comfortable with preserving the status quo. 

*I never reviewed Our Kids because it was such bullshit I couldn't finish it, but Jill Lepore wrote this piece about it in theNew Yorker and it's about everything I would have said but better. 

**The extent to which labor unions exist in Gigged, they are always presented as outdated entities desperately trying to cling to relevancy, but of course the perspective and goals of the organizers are never shared.