An acquaintance of mine supports the gig economy because “it must be good for workers because it allows them more freedom to take jobs they want and gives them more control over their lives. If they don’t like their job, they can work for another gig employer who pays more.” He is convinced that there is a huge labor shortage and that the concept of the reserve army of labor is a myth. I asked him why, if the gig economy is good for workers, capitalists overwhelmingly support it and workers overwhelmingly oppose it. He said he didn’t know, then refused to consider the question any further.

His views are largely based on his own experience doing gig economy work - he does contracting work transporting hazardous chemicals and maintaining computer systems done in obsolete architectures like COBOL. This pays so well that he only has to work six months out of the year and he brags about companies getting in bidding wars to hire him. He thinks all the terribly underpaid gig workers should just do what he does. I pointed out that there are 15 million gig workers in the US but (by the statistics he provided) only 80000 openings for jobs like his, so even if people took his advice, he’d just be left with an oversaturated job field and millions of workers still stuck in their existing awful jobs. He said until gig workers took his advice and filled those jobs, there was no point in discussing that.

He said whether an employer provides health insurance doesn’t matter to him because he lives in a state that kept the medicaid expansion. He also believed that no other benefits for salaried workers (retirement account matching, etc.) were worthwhile.

I sent him a link showing that a third of gig workers make sub-minimum wage and his response was “Well, maybe the other two-thirds are doing great. They should just pay for job training for the gig workers who are making below minimum wage.”

At the end of the conversation he said he had no idea what any of this had to do with capitalism vs. socialism.