Reading Gigs Dialectically

Abstract

With gig-based sex work as its analytical lens, this article argues that narratives about the crisis of gigification miss workers’ exits from non-gig employment. It advocates taking gig workers seriously when they say they prefer gigified hustling to clocking in for a middling wage. Gig work’s autonomy, limited as it is, can make the workday materially better. And the platform is not necessarily more powerful, or better able to forge false consciousness, than the cubicle farm or the assembly line. Grounded in sex workers’ critical engagements with the gig economy, the article finds workers armed with sharp class analyses who use gig economies to wrest control over their conditions of work. Their efforts produce uneven ends, but the tactics they deploy and the politics that inform them invite a rethinking of gigification and its stakes for twenty-first-century anti-capitalist struggle.