Wednesday - 3:00-5:45 PM with Madeleine Baker, College Fellow
This course explores how and why “gig work” — featuring flexible, short-term agreements and few of the benefits or protections associated with formal employment — has become so pervasive, with harmful consequences for workers and societies alike. We will examine how unions and federal labor law sought to redress precarity in the early twentieth century; the emergence of early gig-like arrangements like direct selling, multi-level marketing, and franchising; the role of digital technologies in both expanding access to gig work and surveilling gig workers; the possible effects of the AI boom on the gig economy; and labor organizing by gig workers today.
