There’s a cottage industry of takes these days on how Democrats can again become the “party of the working class.” Many of those are reactive, defensive, operate on misleading or ill-considered concepts of what the 21st century working class even is. But today I had one of these pop into my inbox that I read and thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The gist is that Democrats should make themselves the party of gig workers. The title of the article is “Champion the Self-Employed.” But as author Will Norris explains, the demographic and economic profile of those technically categorized as “self-employed” has changed pretty dramatically in recent years. It still includes the generally high-earning and disproportionately white and male consultants and solo operators of various sorts. But as a group it’s now much, much larger — especially in the wake of the pandemic — and is more female and less white. It’s also much lower income, more precarious.
It was only recently that I first heard the phrase, or first registered the phrase, “subsistence entrepreneurs,” which helped me think more clearly about the mix of hustle, precarity and exposure to the various tech monopolies. Norris cites research showing that probably at least 15% of the workforce is properly categorized as independent/self-employed and more expansive definitions may put that number at well over a quarter of the workforce. That’s a lot of people.
Norris notes that Democrats actually have a pretty good story to tell on this front. Obamacare is transformative for anyone without a conventional employer. And there are a lot of other examples. But Democrats seldom talk to or message to them as a group. When you read these sorts of pieces you often hear Democrats don’t do this or that. And, well, they do or kinda do but not as much as the writer wants. But here it’s true and Norris explains really basic reasons why. Democrats are, for very good reasons, very plugged into addressing workers in unions. Even when that’s not the case, the social safety net, which Democrats are rightly very focused on defending, is mostly structured around conventional employment. The additional part of the equation is that gig workers are heavily hived around and often exploited by tech monopolies of various kinds — Uber, Amazon, eBay, the various social media platforms.
I suspect there may be a small additional part of this equation. And that is that some Democrats may see the gig economy not so much as an economic sector to be served and championed as a problem to be solved. And this isn’t a totally crazy idea. Many workers in the gig economy are properly categorized as employees. But they’re working for companies whose business models are based on offloading the various costs tied to employment. Their employers just don’t want to pay for their health care or disability insurance or half their payroll taxes. But obviously this isn’t something that’s going away. And for all the financial precariousness and ripeness for exploitation, for many people being a solo operator is a form of freedom. It can be both. Not everyone wants to punch a clock or answer to a boss. Not everyone is temperamentally or cognitively capable of doing so. I can relate.
None of this will surprise anyone reading this. It’s not that we should know this. We do know this. We get rides from people in the gig economy; we purchase various one-off services from them on myriad apps; we purchase things from them on Amazon and eBay. Many demographic or economic groups, especially those in precarious economic positions, are invisible to the general population, especially more affluent people. But you have to be really, really affluent not to be in contact with people in the gig economy and people with one-person small businesses, like, all the time. But the expansion and demographic transformation of the group is quite recent, a lot just in the last four or five years. So it makes sense that it hasn’t quite come into focus as a political constituency. But it should.
I should note that Norris’s piece is part of a larger package The Washington Monthly published on Democrats and working class voters. So check that out too.