Gendered and generational inequalities in the gig economy era

Abstract

Over the last few decades, there has been a radical transformation of Australia’s labour market and education sector, with intersecting implications for gender and generational inequalities. First, the composition of the labour force has changed. There has been a significant increase in women’s participation in paid work, which has been driven by the changing industrial landscape as well a significant expansion of higher education opportunities for women. At the same time, there has been a steady decline in full-time youth employment. Youth unemployment has become a persistent problem for governments since the late 1980s and 1990s and has only worsened since the global financial crisis (Denny and Churchill, 2016). Primary industry and the manufacturing sectors, once reliant upon unskilled labour, in particular young people who left school early, have waned and there has been a countervailing growth in service industries that require professional, skilled workers (Cuervo and Wyn, 2011). Not only has the composition of the labour market changed, so too has its characteristics. New jobs have different conditions to the old ones. The contemporary labour market is increasingly characterised by what Guy Standing (2011) calls precarious work. Precarious work is ‘uncertain, unstable, and insecure and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses and government) and receive limited benefits and statutory protections’ (Kalleberg, 2018: 1). It is often described as contingent or non-regular work, or referred to as ‘alternative work arrangements’ or ‘flexible staffing arrangements’ (Kalleberg, 2018: 12). Examples of precarious work include temporary work; contract work, including independent contractors; part-time work with a desire for more hours; work with irregular hours; casual work; and own-account self-employed workers (Kalleberg, 2018: 12). The growth in precarious work is a result of structural changes which have eroded the standard employment arrangements that emerged in the post-war period (Kalleberg, 2018). These changes have given rise to what is being termed ‘the gig economy’: a new way of organising economic activity, where workers are not hired on a permanent basis but for shorter or longer term ‘gigs’. This reconfigures labour markets and can on the one hand be seen to encourage a new, digital form of entrepreneurship and provide new opportunities for flexible work patterns. However, especially in a flexible, deregulated economy like Australia, it also exposes individuals to greater financial risks and social insecurities which can deepen existing inequalities. Younger generations are arriving in a labour market in which ‘work’ has increasingly been replaced by ‘gigs’ and ‘tasks’, and this kind of highly casualised, non-standard employment is having a spill-over effect on their non-working lives, which are increasingly disrupted by these social changes. This is what we term the gig economy era. In many ways, it is an extension and continuation of the neoliberal forces which have created the ‘new precariat’ (Standing, 2011), for whom insecure and non-standard employment has become the norm. The introduction to this special issue, Gender and Generational Inequalities in the Gig Economy, begins by mapping the context and configurations that have led to this era and its impact upon young men and women, and introduces the articles contained in the issue. It concludes with a discussion of future avenues for research.