Why Gig Work Needs to Demonstrate Loyalty, and How to Do It

Workers and organizations exist as temporary life companions through numerous cycles of defined duration. Before the pandemic, companies avoided having to provide benefits and full-time salaries for ad hoc work. Gigs requiring less-specialized labor, such as working as a delivery driver, typically attracted minimally trained workers who needed flexibility or supplemental income. And gigs requiring specialized knowledge, such as design work, typically attracted “professional” freelancers who charged a premium rate and often enjoyed lower tax rates for their efforts relative to their full-time employee (FTE) counterparts. While this arrangement has benefited many generations of workers, the pandemic is affecting those at both ends of the gig economy — skilled freelancers and less-specialized laborers — more severely than FTEs, because large numbers of staff redundancies increased the gig worker pool. Early in the pandemic, a flood of these newly unemployed people shifted to high- and low-skill gig work; this glut led to a drop in individuals’ hourly pay due to supply severely outstripping demand — for everyone from marketers to Uber drivers.